Lament of the Danelope (short story page 1 of . . . )

Before you can know what a Danelope laments I'm sure you are asking the same question everyone else is asking. What is a Danelope? Very good question. Let us start with the etymology of the word Danelope then. Danelope is an English word. American to be specific. It first appeared around 1988 in a small bureau in Pennsylvania called Erie. It is a clever bastardization of the Byzantine Greek word anthólops witch according to Wikipedia is first attested in Eustathius of Antioch (c.336), according to whom it was a fabulous animal "haunting the banks of the Euphrates, very savage, hard to catch and having long saw-like horns capable of cutting down trees."

Now that we know where the word Danelope comes from let us not get it confused with the animal that shares the same etymological background as the Danelope. While the antelope is beautiful big eyed African or Asian Bovidae the Danelope is not of this dimension let alone of this world. The Danelope is a disembodied trans-dimensional symbiotic alien parasite spirit which inhabits the limbs of unsuspecting and susceptible human hosts. In this case the poor bastard who had his appendage obsolesced with and I mean this in a very local way, Brono “the host,” never lost his limb to the Danelope but his mind was definitely in question.

How do I know all this? Well, quite frankly I was there. It was Fall of '87 and I was attending my first year of collage at Penn Sate Behrend just outside of Erie, Pennsylvania. I had cruised through high school without ever opening a book and graduated dead middle of my class of some 850 collage potentials. Before I could move on to State Collage, the main Penn State campus, I had to do my time at the state pen or Behrend as the alumni like to call it. On a completely unnecessary side note I never made it to Penn State main campus. At least never for scholastic reasons. It was there at Penn State Behrend that I met Brono.

Brono was an all American boy who served his country in the Navy where they made sure he was properly medicated to server his county all the way up until the day he requested freedom to speak freely. His Captain granted him permission and Brono spoke earning himself a section eight, mental discharge, right out of the armed service.

Maybe it was the 38 odd medications he was on to keep him even while on his tour of duty aboard an American military battle cruiser. Uppers. Downers. Blue pills. White pills. Ones to make him sleep. Ones to keep him awake. Anti-depressants, Bi-polar medication. Solutions for ADHD. Beta-blockers for anger. Others to pick him up.

Maybe my friend Brono was crazy. Regardless the Captain didn't take long to dispatch Brono after he described in extremely unpleasant graphic detail the sounds the Captain's skin and subsequently muscle sinew and bone would make rubbing against the main guns as he was fired out of them. When I say “extremely unpleasant” I'm talking about the kind of graphic detail that Clive Barker and Stephen King would cringe at while holding each other for comfort. Maybe it was the 38 odd medications Brono was on. Maybe not. Only the Danelope knows.