sick story time

The Three Brazen Cowards

2011-12-24T18:26:00.004-07:00

illustration by jesse stevens

A lone car skated on the edge of oblivion.

It was a wood-paneled PT Cruiser with three burros in it.

The elder burro was driving. His right hoof pressed against the steering wheel, with his left elbow resting on the open window sill. The stub of a lit Cuban cigar was wedged between two lower side teeth.

Vultures circled slowly in the skies beyond, forming a lazy halo, targeting yet another dead thing below.

The lead burro could barely keep the car on the road. Skidding out of control every now and again, he yanked hard on the steering wheel in an attempt to avoid some jackhammers left lying next to newly dug potholes.

"Where's the damn music in this tin machine?" barked the distracted driver through the slot between his huge front teeth.

The burro in the passenger seat—a gray, forlorn looking jack—leaned forward and began twisting the radio knob, seeking through static and white noise, pausing at each new song or jingle that came warbling through, until he had completed a full round of all three available stations.

"Use tha FM signal jackstump—"

The donkey in the back seat just stared ahead through the windshield at the oncoming scenery slowly washing over them.

The voice behind the one lone working speaker morphed into a porcine squeal.

"—Rifefullamatics in a French regime intransigence maneuvers..."

The jack in the front seat twisted a knob.

*static*

"...uprising in Southwesthamshire..."

*yawing—*

He twisted the knob again.

*—warble* "...introducing a constant and noble...

*knob-twist* ...city of lost knowledge—".

Barkey slapped the radio off himself with a cuff and a bray, knockin' the jack's hoof off the dashboard.

"Where's the Rolling Stones when ya need em? Got any of that wild Willy Wonkastic left? We gotta find us some mares."

He clenched the Cuban cigar between his teeth and drove on.

Cornrows began passing by on either side of them.

Two police cruisers could be seen parked a quarter mile ahead on the left shoulder—each with their own snared victim.

Barkey pressed a hoof against the accelerator—it was a matter of chance, but the timing was crucial in a situation like this.

Either one of those Clydesdales could be finishing his business and ready to spring-release himself on the next passing vehicle.

It was a matter of perfect timing to avoid getting nabbed, on account of the fact that every commuter without exception was speeding—and well over twenty miles past the limit, mind you.

For the Clydesdales, it was shooting fish in a barrel.

Better speed now and get past them, or with their luck—Woot—they'd be nabbed sure as shingles.

Rain began pattering against the windshield. Smoke whipped out of the driver's window in steadily vacuumed gusts.

They were cruising along at around an even ninety miles an hour. It was high summer alongside a midwestern mountain range.

No one was prepared to die that day. Least of all, the Clydesdales.

The PT Cruiser with the three burros slipped past both parked police vehicles while the Clydesdales were mounting back into them.

The rain stopped. Barkey switched off the wipers. He crushed out his cigar butt in the pop-out ashtray.

"Strap on." He accelerated the vehicle up to 100mph.

Blue lights flashed on behind them, accompanied by the familiar yowling of the police sirens.

Both of them cruisers were in the rearview mirror now.

How'd they nab us so suddenly?

Barkey looked over at his jackmate in the passenger seat.

All three burros stared straight ahead through the bug spattered windshield.

"You pullin' over boss?" asked the jack in the passenger seat.

After a quick verification in the rearview, Barkey grit his large teeth and hissed through them.

"Ya damn straight I'm pullin' over. Now both of ya shaddup and lemme do the talkin'."

He eased the vehicle nice and steadily down to 90mph, and with a practiced self assurance, slowly brought her down to 80...until he reached the speed limit of 75mph, at which point he put on his right blinker, and began easing over into the next lane, in preparation to pull over onto the shoulder.

Directly ahead lay the entrance to a bridge. There wasn't enough distance to pull over safely. He'd have to wait until they were passed the bridge, now.

A 55mph sign flashed by. Barkey eased his rear right hoof off the gas. Another glance in the rearview revealed the Clydesdale at the wheel to be frantically gesturing with his hooves for him to pull over.

At that moment they plunged through and onto the bridge. The last opportunity to pull over disappeared behind them in an instant. The Clydesdale chasing them behind the wheel only seemed to become more agitated and flamboyant, he could be seen in the rearview gesturing rudely with his right hoof.

The second police car nudged up alongside them. This second driver was casually loading a gigantic-muzzled old fashioned snub-nosed revolver in his lap, with one hoof on the wheel and a sardonic grin on his muzzle.

Panic flashed through Barkey's mind—but after flaring out, it dissolved away into so much acrid smoke streaming out the window—and grim resolve set itself in its place.

The dogged donkey continued to drive 55mph, determined to complete the 12-mile bridge's distance without breaking a sweat nor going over the speed limit.

The second cruiser with the revolver fell back alongside his partner. Now both police cars appeared almost frantic in their chase, lights flashing and sirens blaring into the distance.

The burro in the back seat of the escape car coughed.

"I'm feeling nauseous again—d'ya think—"

Before he could finish his sentence, pink bubblegum-like tendrils whiplashed from both police cars behind them, ensnaring their speeding vehicle in a giant sticky-stringed spiderweb netting.

The next thing any of the burros knew, the cruisers continued on a trajectory above and over them, pulling the pink and semi-elastic webbing taut until it hauled their moving PT cruiser up off the road and into the blinding blue of the afternoon sky.

Over the radio station, wind blasted through the lowered windows in the escape car. All three burros stared directly ahead through the windshield into the glaring sunlight.

They couldn't even see the helicops ahead and above them, hauling their asses back to the Grain Compound.

The two sidekick burros were nothing more than mules, really. They didn't even know they were—that was the sad and funny thing. They were no hinnies, that's for sure. Barkey brayed out with sudden laughter.

All he wanted, all he dreamed of, his entire life while incarcerated in the Moonshine Pits over at the Grain Compound, was to eat heated-up beans out of a can. Over a real campfire.

To wake up alongside the rails of the tracks turned blood red by the setting sun. To learn how to play the drums. Or the banjo.

Barkey looked up one last time at the overhead sprawled out clouds, reeling by on their journey back Home.

This is what we get for attempting to go against the Grain.

He sighed. A burro can always dream.

CITIwakes

2011-03-25T15:52:00.002-06:00

The meshPasser undergoes an a priori examination of its insular membrane and various obverse mechanisms, momentarily recharging in the twi-dulled murk of the Arcasm Ritual Building, sarcastically referred to as the A.R.B. by weary tenants. Heliocentric memory eraser plasma-pulse frequencies sporadically annihilate thirty percent of the sprawling community's immediate recollections. The rest soak in the ultraviolet neon sponsorship of causal determinism, relishing in the uplift throughout the megalopolis, introduced by the incessantly gnawing away thrash dancebeats subliminalized by endorphin-spiked electromagnetic rhythms incorporated into the Systemic Periodic Elemental Reactionist Multiplex sound system—injected citywide by the Corporate Inquisition Terminal Interface.

The Heberin Collective are wired for a night out on the town. Their Moderator has cc'd them clownWhite, a neopurgative pulse enhancer designed to work out the stress from the hardbeats of the daily grind. Heberin moves through the CITIscape with the ease of an octopus in stealth locomotion, under cover of the hyper-neon polylit continuum scarved about them in perpetuity. Embedded headphones, most designed after compound insect eyes, fit snug like iridescent bottlecaps over the eartunnels. The earlobe itself had long dropped away from an overripened humanity in its latter-era stages of evolution amidst the frequency lanes.

Aesthetic tribal bodily piercing gradually mutated to a far more utilitarian scope. Die hard implants sunken into key skullpoints have the firmly rooted tenacity of mountain climbing spikes left driven into cliff fissures. Whether for the commuter Ziplines, or for more extreme recreational sports, is left to the individual CITIzen to convey. Ever since the dawning of this new age of neoExpressionism, the will of the populace is no longer such a concern to government, as is the controlling of the overwhelming urge to self-express or otherwise create in a manner suitable for the background and influential exploits of the middle class—a middle class driven to a frenzy of consumption, perpetuated by a similar motivation from an industry that caters to personal excess.

Through various means of interface and a veritable wide-angled spectrum of choices by which to administer a myriad of perception-enhancing and/or -distorting drugs to an all-too compliant citizenship, the CITI itself has been quite successful in organizing a sort of nocturnal emission exorcism ritual, effectively banishing the shed demons every night in an orgy of nightclub catharsis, highlit by strobing lights synchronized to an unfathomably monstrous beat keeping the ongoing crowd moving and shaking out on the viewscreen dance floors.

Wired for more than just sound and purple-laced visions, the Heberin Collective voluntarily assign themselves the bearers of an ultimately unregistered, and therefore potentially dangerous, form of psyche-enhancement known as Lady Salvation, an often copied (yet never replicated) chemical Psionic Communion Wafer. One taste of its mnemonic circuitry triggers a placebo domino effect. Illegally peddled and inferior substitutes have been known to induce lurid visions of a Salivating Lady perpetually coming at the user with hooked fingers under a drooling rictus, as if caught in an infinite loop of nightmarish attack. Such slogans or half-believed stories as the "Lady in Waiting", which are passed among schoolchildren to this day, are generated by these replicating motifs as expressed through constant generations of aloof and disenfranchised collegiates in the throes of shedding their own personal angst. Visualized and embodied under the boosted effects of synthesized cultigens combined with MemErase (necessarily every Rager's beverage of choice), these cautionary myths eventually took root.

Under the auspices of a normal Heberin outing, there cannot be an individual's comprehension of one's own role in the undertaking, for the nature of the Collective is to forego individuality itself in favor of the enhancement of a groupsoma experience—something that only the groupMind can know and even begin to understand. Which is precisely the reason many CITIzens volunteer for such an enterprise in the first place. Human consciousness has explored the lonely peripheries of isolation to its ultimate limits, again and again and again. Such deadening of that nerve seemed bound for no good reason or destiny, and although it took humanity many failed generations of missing the mark of opportunity, eventually the time arrived when its constituents began ceasing to think so much of themselves, and turn to wondering, what's out there, so immense and hollow and sprawling and vibrant?

So has ritual continued to form the behaviors of young persons. Riticen, a bisexed Caucasian from a gender-specific, postSchool colony in the American Pacific Northwest, reflects on his most recent, nocturnal sojourn from Dutyfree. Such a widespread feeling—that is, tingling from all the nerve centers clustered from head to toe—of exultant liberation shoots through Riticen, that he shakes his hair free rapidly of the steamshower droplets, and steps out of the hydroslot, to stand dripping before the two-way mirror. He reaches over and nudges the door open a few inches, letting the circulation from the rest of the apartment enter the washroom. Wiping the steamed looking glass clear with a towel, Riticen waits for his image to gain focus in the heated conditions before him. Gradually, his haggard features reveal themselves through the clearing mist. Reflected in the humid mirror Riticen sees the meshPasser mask, hanging limp from a peg behind him. He reaches back for it without turning his head, and grabs its familiar, comforting form in his right hand. For a moment, the neural connectivity breaches the impasse he'd left off with, sending dim sparks of reassurance up through the nerves of his arm.

Riticen slips the meshPasser mask on over his head, and grins as it reinforces his facial physique. Its perfectly balanced endorphin enhancers motivate Riticen with the exact amount of chemical inspiration needed to face the Collective's quest for the evening. Wide-eyed and staring at himself in the mirror, a complete stranger reflects back behind a flesh-toned, featureless mask with all the blank expression of a department store mannequin. Search as he might for any memory of Heberin's past nocturnal activities that may lie concealed behind the reflections of his darkened eyes, Riticen emerges empty-headed from the washroom, having entirely forgotten, or perhaps merely not ever having been in a position to know first-hand anyhow, the oblique details of completed excursions. Whatever cloaked activities the group of mysterious co-benefactors had committed itself to, it was impossible for each individual to consciously recall them. Riticen turns and slips out of his CITIcube, then just as quickly, out of the tenement complex and into the night.

The Merging is a process that takes anywhere from mere moments, to hours, or even, on rare occasions (such as attempted mergers with new or distant Collectives), days. Riticen cannot imagine waiting any longer than the few minutes it usually takes him to begin Merging. Most of the volunteers in his Collective, he imagines, must dwell somewhere within or near the sprawling perimeters of his own CITIcube. Otherwise, the etherConduits' electroconnectivity surpassed his capacity to imagine. Normally, after turning the second or third CITIblock, the merger begins to take effect.

As Riticen steps toward an intersection of busily bypassing electromagnet Cushion Cars, the prerecorded digital soundbytes of lions roaring fades away to be replaced by the insistent chirruping of tropical birds—an indication that intersection crosswalks are primed for safe pedestrian crossing. An electronic amalgamation of coyote yips morphing into wolf howls segue the moments before the crosswalks' pedestrian safety is heralded as coming to an imminent end. The lion roars are reserved for the actual passing of lethal traffic, itself synchronized so that no intersecting spokes of the roadways' oncoming traffic must wait their turn. Instead, mass multi-directional pedestrian crossings take turns consistently with multiple and simultaneous vehicular crossings—the various, advancing minicars themselves interpenetrating with exact timing and zero collisions—just one example of the many flowered patterns in the pulse and flow of CITIlife.

As Riticen steps back up to a CITIblock curb, his viewpoint of the funneling crowd forges against him and in a dizzying, panoramic moment, blends along with him into the slipstream, suddenly giving way to an unfamiliar pressure of heavy gloaming, as if the velvet underside of the city's streaming haze had become an oppressive inversion, and he staggers beneath its weight as if he'd donned a lead apron, and then a whistling overture of white noise reductionism formulated a wind snapping latticework, as of a tightly woven superfabric buffeted by an overpowering gale from behind. A blinding sensation of whiteout spread over the meshPasser's tinted lenses, dialed to protect the retina and subsequent ganglion cells which serve as an inlet to the superimpositioning of the holographic laser light injection.

Vague, distant impressions of slapped, woven metal cordons against outstretched palms rushed in on eddies of reviving consciousness, each subsequent wave of which poured down in a funneling stained glass tunnel over the mendicant's hoods...surfers of oblivion blinded by the white gales of blasted time...lapping distant waves of licked drops of laughter flung off the tips of tongues...dissolving in a hushed babelogue of interpenetrative chanting accorded from the arabesques of yesterday's desires, and dusted off the forgotten relics of all antecedent dreams.

Winnowing in winterlight, through minnowguts, translucent and underlined with waterproof mascara, blinking false displays of chameleonic spots for eyes, thorned with disarrays and first-night-out-ever thighs, slumped to glittering scales both wide-angled and magnified, the compound vision in mimicked reflection of tiny repeated forms stretched out to radialize a centrifugal stage upon which ardent hopes yet promised to materialize. A beckoning, much like a mating ritual dance, performed by plumed lizards or feathered raptors in a trance. An unvisualized soaring...the letting go of a ship from its sails... perfunctorily grinding to a halt against the backwashed turbulence of the roiling waves...temporarily cast off against a stomach churning impasse. As if to say, or at least suggest, that there is no way one could pass this test.

Images strip from the silver screen of his mind's eye in such quick succession, that only a blur of associations is left in Riticen's fading recollection. And these, in and of themselves, are each captured by surging wavecrests from out of the depths, snatched from quiescence by a vulgar demand they be eaten by the collective unconscious wallowing beneath like a great, undulating blister of foul, decompressed air just wafting upwards for its inevitable venting toward an unsuspecting yet all-too-deserving surface.

Riticen's eyes snap open in an underground oxygen bar. A patron dipped in synthetic, glow-in-the-dark latex brandishes a knowing look in his direction, before disappearing into the depths amid strobes of pulsing black light. Refreshed to a point distinguished by every pixel in his eyes, Riticen sips generously from his ninety-ounce staff drink, held firmly as a cane in his stable right hand. The drink holder rather resembles a faintly glowing, fungus-patched oaken branch, sanded down and varnished to a well-protected finish. From a sheared-off bole emerges a microcircuit drinking straw—or so the imagistic software suggests, through manipulated photoreceptors.

As the cool, lime-green and slightly radioactive flavor of the Benzylamine-laced drink passes through his taste buds and down his throat and into his stomach, Riticen slowly realizes the latest Collective mergerQuest has come to another, rather abrupt, end. Leaving him exactly where within the sprawling confines of the CITIplex, he can only guess. None of the establishment's artistry or neon sloganeering provokes any stirring of memory from him in the least. A hazy recollection of being in the A.R.B. surfaces momentarily. There is a sense of anesthetic cushioning to his memory; a gauzy sort of tunnel vision, limned with a dusty, brightening light, like that which precedes the onset of a migraine headache, when all attention is brought to a central spot of glaring incandescence which otherwise obscures what might be glimpsed directly ahead. When this ravaged hole of radiance begins to expand and eat up the entire range of Riticen's field of vision, that is when the blinding pain of a migraine splits through, and the world reels about spasmodically as his locomotive escape from the O2Club is engendered, and a section of the CITIcurb rises from the fog and acclimates itself resolutely against his fallen body.

The Receding Horizon of Tomorrow's Dream

2010-02-03T14:00:00.003-07:00

A starfire came winnowing up from the fanning motion caused unwittingly by three mule men sitting at a polished obsidian table playing Cabron with a soft greasy deck of cards so worn out the hearts and spades had been colored back in several times over the years. They had gambled away their sapien souls in the game against El Chulo, lost over the withered and dried crops hacking out dust clouds in a slow roiling backwards motion revealing the uncurled entrails of a slaughtered pig shark.

Slit open flaps stretched out, pinned with its own serrated hook teeth in a screaming revelation of its inner abortion. A gurgle sucking rolled up nearly translucent worm baby whose coal diamond eyes have dialed open the short distance between it and its dead mother splayed and hacked wide open a monotone receiver - (no answer) - so kid, rictus set, resolved to climb the ladder until several new skins grew and shed, each enmeshed from the stripped hides of jackal daffodils growing wild like fireweed in sussuration, lichen lapsed in a hungry siege vortex.

Attempting penetration of a maximum security business office shielded by man tall mirrors tiled against the lost dwarf star slipping into unconsciousness the farther scientific knives brighten, the less strands left from the cut cord unraveling dead weight pulling gravity grinning knowing who's winning because the few left in the open have lost god, was the rough approximation of what a 273 year old sea tortoise glimpsed in a nictitating fraction of a moment as it gazed into a still eyelet of sheer lucid reflection one blood drop removed from rippling out of focus.

A delicate interval suspended in bright silence blitzshrieked in a gradient ramped in by the frenzied choral overtures of frequency city, and the great ancient corrugated fins stroked twin hooked track patterns in the sand, where hermit crabs have traced and mimicked the nervous history of Cheloniidae already; a crooked, branching network leading across random vistas of moonlit bones of coral where ghost crabs haunt the sidewinder ways and a binary star is visible to the naked eye of an octopus secreting a dried out mucous castle to peer out from under the pier at the hunchbacked manacled procession of slaves furrowed in the brow of a central american wasteland.

Singled out as the only inheritance, and with the edges melting from the poles more every year, the jilted dancing reflections, like moths flying apart in a darkened jar, with the lord of hydrogen dissolving from the sky, Juan Carlos Morte simply lifted his hands to the universe, pulling shoulder harness straps looped twine taut, a jack in the box surprise over oily thumbed cards, geisha veiling the shotgun blast behind a paper partition. Spray art and brimstone rising sunburst spattered spangled and tattered in the age old manner of surrender, taken for waving goodbye, the lousiest hand of goat rummy sporadic chance ever dealt.

Carina Nebula Panorama

2009-08-07T16:43:00.001-06:00

by shaun a. lawton

photo courtesy of Hubblesite.com

The continuum of space in this region curves along the contours of an astronomical skull vaguely human in appearance. The skull lingers, the image of a face thrown from a ghost into a colossal mirror. It is comprised of slowly shifting loops of pregalactic dustmotes. They gather together to form a smokelike chalice, a shadow thrown from the excalligraphed egg developing right beside it. This egg is illuminated from within by green mossy patches in a star-sparked albumen draped in suspension across the vacuum, a whispered dream of things to come. The placental egg-sac mirrors a faint visage of an infant's ovoid skull, a superimposed mask of bone looking downward and away, fog and shadow drifting from its eye sockets.

This vast explosively forming egg of cosmic debris is ridden by a wide-shouldered warrior whose long dark hair blows in the solar winds. He oversees the development of this crucial nexus, formulating a sort of galactic nest. Past civilizations on Earth have often mistaken the great over shadowing skull's left eye socket and expanding nasal ring for the gilded butterfly wings of the rider's steed. These wings were construed in ancient times as being a part of the constellation Vela. In half forgotten myths, they once represented the sails of a mammoth ship named the Argo.

This region of deep space is now called Carina, and it's spirit guardian is the warrior rider Navis. Argo might have been the haunted egg gifted with the shadow of promise that we can now see Navis ride to defend; whatever the case, most legends like these are lost now, sunken below the waves of distant memory. This current glimpse of Navis's solar photoshadow serves as a reminder that he was assigned to preserve the egg-cache. Argo is a galaxy in utero, and it must be protected and defended from injury or evil, and allowed to fully develop.

The unfathomable stream of flowing hydrogen below Navis is an analog of the river Lethe. In the fulcrum of expanding space, seminality is reversed, hence the flowing hydrogen gas represents life. Yet it is a predatory life aiming to feed on the rich astral nutrients of Argo, therefore it represents certain death to the developing galactic foetus. The river of hydrogen passes along the equivalent, in outer space terms, of an underground cavern. The cavern is overseen by a couple of neighboring globular clusters: the astral rabbit and stellar black panther. The rabbit can be seen distinctly squatting on its haunches, in profile. Its left eye rolled back, forever on the lookout for marauders sneaking up from behind. The panther is below him, overlooking the astral river's source. Both these star clusters are guardians of Lethe's riverbanks. They patrol the entrance at the foothills of the interstellar mountains, from which grows the Sanguine Tree. This celestial tree towers munificently behind everything in that region. Wrapped in scarves of universal mist, the Sanguine Tree's roots grip the edge of a cliff face whose slope plummets straight into the starry depths. An enormous grinning troll with the power to hypnotize can be seen guarding the tree. The surrounding debris framing this entire scene is the shed outer coronal ring of Argo's flash birth. Various lords of light can be seen gathering for this event.

In the gray flowing mist of the Lethe, astronomic cephalopods swim through on their way downriver. They migrate towards the floating amnion-veiled, empyrean foetus Navis defends. They wish to feed upon his winged egg. His sense of pride, from having been assigned this post, ever burgeons, like a peacock's tail feathers, in a ratio directly proportional to the development of the embryonic cache he helps incubate. Argo is the very motherlode of celestial particles that will coalesce to form a galaxy. By the time the brood hatches into sentience, Navis will have long evaporated into a mere memory of a ghost imprinted on the lens of their mind's eye.

Navis beholds all manner of nautilus spawn frilling towards him through the misty currents of the Lethe. He watches as they approach the great chain of glittering islands strewn along the borders surrounding his incubating egg's celestial nesting cradle. The frillspawn have begun their genesis of a long untiring journey towards the promised haven that awaits them on the other side of the necklace of islands. They strive to reach the head of the nest egg Navis has sworn to defend until his final dissolution.

Mysterious characters lurk within the clustering shadows in the cavernous regions by the source of the Lethe. Many naiads and hydriades dwell along the riverbanks there. They appear to orginate from a nearby rearing seahorse star cluster. This supercluster confers with a half-wolf, half-man cluster named Amnos. These two act out their roles amidst lanes of newborne galaxies. Not all star clusters have names. Some of these form like streaming capes, some resemble kites with twisting trails behind them. Various older myths claim these as the distillate ejecta of reincarnated manta rays and other marine life. Today they are simply refered to as nebulae.

Faces of the recently forgotten, half remembered, and totally imagined slowly form themselves out of the abstract vapors haunting the shallows of these riverbanks. Among the reeds they beckon the occasional wandering dryad to their doom. Many naiads come out to appropriate a chambered nautilus or other cephalopod, in hopes of riding it all the way to the promised gardens rumored to be hidden beneath the hatching egg's unfolding wings. Every one of the encroaching incunabula are knocked from their saddle by Navis's controlled sling bolts.

Among the most striking aspects of the composition (as revealed through gravitational microlensing) is how the great skull haunting the rider of the winged egg foetus resembles a shadow flag. A flag that serves as a reminder of a superimposed reflection whispering promises from an almost forgotten dream. That dream must be the lost echo of a song issued from contractions during this distant solar flux. The reverberations of this music awaken some of us today, one at a time, trapped out here on the lonely periphery of this isolated wharf, long abandoned in the annals of space. Gazing from our stranded pier with enhanced vision escalated through a glass monocle, the nearly disregarded tapestry of this lost legend calls out subconsciously a siren serenade. A requiem which tells of the harbinger of that winged bird of paradise. It sings of the forgotten forerunner and protector. It relates how the vision of our eyes equals the music of our dreams.

~ ~ ~

Four-line Stories

2009-07-10T19:12:00.001-06:00

folk tale

satyr amerind hybrid union dance
shadowthrown in hive chambers of honey light
andromorphous scream in self-sacrifice, reflecting
a dream visor removed quick for noticing chroma

caravan

wind driven a memory dubbed gaels
licked catlike at our sails; prows cut
dream powered, below decks seven slept;
under in silence the chevron of orca led

In Other Voids

Everything has its place in the shifting winds,
was said. All of it trapped in the focus of a
magnificent lens, being outer space itself that
curves dreaming souls across to star in other voids.

On Mount Drone

The spectrum light from fractured dreams
a dream a piece of carbon, every sound
a memory of its having been made, and every
sight a dream of a time passed away.

gone

sheafs fold on a sharp wind slap against
poles as desperate, brief want ads to be
ripped away by an unseen howling whose
chilling message is lost to no one

Plastic Owl Effigy

2009-01-24T11:02:00.002-07:00

We discovered the entrance to a universe halfway up a hiking trail.
We were exploring one of the canyons along the mountain range nearby.
We've made it a ritual every winter to hike up the trails after dark.
There is no one else to bother us or get in our way sledding back down.
A blanket of snow is draped across everything in gleaming silence.
Sticking to the well packed path is necessary to prevent sinking too deep.
We drag our sleds behind us as we wind up the trail with light sticks.
Placing them carefully at bends in the path as markers, little glow posts.
Facing our mortality in the winds of night on a mountainside is a blast.
Sharing the forest with night creatures reminds us of our relationship.
Our relationship to the occult sky and the starpoints spread out above.
The kinship felt with the wind answers the question where do we roam?
Anywhere we please so long as we can carry our hearts and eyes along.
Off a bend in the path about a half mile up the trail we spotted an owl.
It was up on a branch in the half gloom, starlight reflected off its eyes.
Unblinking it regarded us in what some would consider a baleful stare.
As birds have always been our spirit guides, we knew better than this.
Owls in particular are indicators of portentous probability, to us.
This one proved to be something more as it flew away through the gloom.
It looked back over its feathered shoulder at us indicating we should follow.
Its aerial path took it between older trees deeper into the sighing forest.
Having been literally born for exploration of the unknown, we followed.
The ticking forest welcomed us into its embrace. We left our sleds behind.
That owl led us back to the city and is now perched over our front door.
It turned into a hollow plastic effigy filled with smooth rounded stones.
It fools petty scavenger birds from swooping into our yard for scraps.
The sleds were recovered and now hang in the garage, warped with time.
The ringing laughter cascading in our yard brings echoes of this memory.
Our children are forbidden from ever exploring the mountain after dark.
We simply want to prolong their time with us here in our heart.

A Tale For Children

2009-01-22T18:31:00.001-07:00

Wikki is a snuggly wuggly
Pretty Blue was cuddly too
Fuzzy Wuzzy was dropped eight feet
Zachary the owl was really neat

All these things I say are true
Now how many pets
remember you?

Smokey was a cocker spaniel
of deepest darkest black
Bambi was a small and spotted
spindly-legged fawn

Lancelot the ocelot and his twin brother
Ivanhoe romped until dawn amidst the pieces
of Bambi spread all over the lawn

Because Bambi got eaten
by a pack of wild dogs
who fell in from the woods
late at night while
the children slept

and the fire from
the fireplace licked
at the logs and all the
adults stood by and wept

because there was nothing that they could do
to bring Bambi back who was scattered
and shredded and gobbled-up by the pack
who though they're roaming around now
and feeling well fed,

they're looking for YOU and all of your friends
and family too to steal into your home
during the wee hours of night and
rip off your face with their teeth--

--they just might.

'Twas a terrible tragedy to behold
Smokey ran off with the murderous pack
the ocelots ate cockroaches,
got sick, and died.
Fuzzy slept under
the tire for the
very last time.

While Pretty Blue and Zachary flew
off into the cloud jungle blue
and Tangle Bones Rubber Head Wikki Wikki Kitty
was left to be cared for by Jen in the city.

~ fin ~

Through the Creeping Glass

2009-01-22T18:23:00.001-07:00

Evening's primal tide
pulls us to her dark girth
the sun's heat rise severs
our umbilicals of birth
the shade of night falls, a filter
slivered into a vertical pupil opening
silent unseen gates through which
a predatory bestiary steps
into this, our world
after the curtains
of dusk are drawn
the theater of sleep
projects fractured visions
within our domed cathedrals
while outside, IN THE GREAT
WALL OF THE WILD the darker
side of thy lacine thrives
and the children are trained
to walk in the sun all their lives
and to run from the stories of wolves
that are lies cried out by the elder
and weaker in power who've been
given three tries at building
their enamel tower black
on the landscape of dream
scaring the crows away
with a crucifix loom
as its shadow leans out
while the Sun's going down
and the majority of the whole
of men awaken from their
nightmare's compounded
gravity to walk around
in the lightness of the Sun
each one a beast
with a mask of complacency
and a mime without individuality
a king stripped of sceptre
or a jester tricked back
into forgetting to remember
he's a member of the cast
hypnotized into performing
the dream that is played
in the cathedral of wilderness
for the seated rows of hooded monks,
reptiles watching themselves.

A Scanner Trade

2008-04-23T08:20:00.001-06:00

Happily the technocrat drone clone
from the mutAnt colony sub_human1
whistled his way to his weekly splinter tribe Faction 9
Survivalist meeting. (He was only required to make it
half way to the meetings, of course.

In that span the TSA supercomplex
had assimilated all the information it required
for the meeting to proceed without him.
Reports, notes, speeches scanned and
mindsets imprinted.)

The drone clone stepped off the commuter trax
at the very next exit, and stepped into the wind.
It was free to do what it wanted to.

>H

2008-04-01T13:02:00.000-06:00

Four years later, the first transhuman in vivo Minksian-Kurzweill clone emerges from its neonatal intensive care unit, eyes unblinking. Max would quickly grow to establish the first CORE school (Consilience Of Recombinant Extropy) by the seasoned age of four. In the year 2020, eight year old Max would engender a transubstantiative doctrine reprising Heraclitus' ideas of flux, and publish his manifesto >H by sending it back in time to his conception-year, where it now appears on carefully selected nodal points of the internet.

Cherry Cyst

2007-10-17T10:12:00.003-06:00

On her way into work Wednesday morning, Sira felt an uncomfortable sensation begin in the pit of her cervix. At first she gripped the bone handled steering wheel harder, whitening her knuckles to pale translucent creases. The streetlight in the intersection ahead went from green to yellow to purple under the slanting rain. The new county mandate set up the random purple traffic lights as motivation for the general malaise infecting the populace.

In recent years this plague of popular apathy spread like a fuzzy mold over a field of fallen crabapples. It became more noticeable throughout the seasons during each city hall meeting. Every Saturday when the local townsfolk gathered in the dilapitated whitewalled church, there were more pathetic weary lined faces and fewer shiny bright eyed ones. Eventually there came the day when only two members of the community were left who cared about anything. They spotted each other across the room.

"Just think," offered Sira, as she eyed the remaining apaphiles silently drooling in the assembly hall, "what implementing a randomized purple streetlight might do for the community."

Her fascinated crony thought about it and replied, "Um...yeah, but what exactly will the purple light mean?" He was a nineteen year old skater bible boy named Bills.

"That's just it Bills - it could mean anything. I was thinking it could be a license meant to trigger a spontaneous reaction from the driver."

"You mean like spinning a chamber with one bullet in it then pulling the trigger."

"No Bills, that's not what I was thinking exactly. I meant...more like, if the light turns purple, then you could do anything you wanted."

"But the options are so limited. You mean, if you wanted to stop, then stop, and if you wanted to keep going, then keep going?" Bills index finger paused just shy of his left nostril, as if caught before the cookie jar.

"Well yeah. And if you wanted to get out of your car and walk away, the purple light would sanctify that." Sira glanced over at the remaining assembly, who weren't paying attention in the least.

"This could really be a motivating factor in the ordinary mill of our lives," speculated Bills.

"Just imagine it," ventured Sira. "You're approaching the traffic light, ready to turn right. You see the light go from yellow to purple. Immediately you decide screw it, I'm turning left!" Sira watched Bills expectantly.

The light of realization crept into Bills's orange eyes. "I see what you mean. Maybe they decide it's not such a fine day to go to work, after all. So instead they turn left and drive right out of the town limits. Maybe head up the canyon, go for a quick mountain hike..." Bills's mouth hung slightly open at the thought.

"Exactly," Sira sighed. "We could really use a purple streetlight. That's it, I'm putting it into effect immediately. Any objections?" she asked the disconsolate crowd seated around them in the auditorium. No one so much as acknowledged she had spoken.

Bills and Sira shook hands firmly. She faxed Engineering about the matter just before leaving. Unsurprisingly, no one else in the hall bothered to get up and leave. Bills and Sira just left them there.

Engineering was an efficiently run department. They had the new traffic light system set up within a week. Thank god for outsourcing, Sira thought as she headed into work on that Wednesday morning, when the dull ache began in her cervix. When she saw the light go from yellow to purple she actually squealed out loud. Her mind raced ahead to all the possible permutations of choices before her.

Suddenly she jerked the cracked bone handled steering wheel to the right, and jumped the curb onto the sidewalk. Three homeless persons scattered out of the way, paper bags dropped and potatoes rolled across the sidewalk into the gutter. She began maneuvering the vehicle down the sidewalk, focusing on avoiding random obstacles. A fire hydrant, a street sign, a bicycle rack; Sira evaded these with ease. She then reached the corner and turned right, where the sidewalk ahead of her was formed of cobblestones. She proceeded up that walkway across the rounded stones, her car jouncing as her silky straight black hair bobbed along to the cobbles. She concentrated as she worked the steering wheel to avoid the occasional rabbit or puppy wandering out of the passing alleyways.

Just before reaching the sidewalk's end, an apple stand blocked her way, so she set the car in park and turned off the engine. She opened her driver's door and stepped out of the car. A tongue of wind licked at her bobbed hair. She strode over to the apple cart but the vendor could not be seen anywhere. Every apple was a different color. Some were striped in the fashion of a barber pole. She suddenly realized she was out of pocket change. Quickly looking up and down the street for the vendor, and not spotting him anywhere, she decided to follow her impulse to steal one of the barber-striped apples. And that was okay, because she was still following the impulse from the purple traffic light. The light told her to do it.

The Shed

2007-03-23T11:13:00.001-06:00

Rudy was seventeen. He lived out in the back yard, in a shed that his stepfather helped him convert into an insulated bedroom. Rudy liked it out there, separated from the glowing warmth of the main house, where his mother, stepfather, and younger brother dwelled. It was quieter and darker in the back part of the yard the shed occupied. The shed couldn't have been more than thirteen by thirteen square feet, all told. His stepfather David used to keep all his tools stored in there.

Propped inside had been a couple of rakes, some snow shovels, even a wood lathe, which had cost David a pretty penny. There was also the regular assortment of toolboxes, wrenches, screw drivers, hammers, a pickaxe, barbed wire, old coffee cans full of nails, and curious odds and ends the two had liberated from various junk yards. The usual stuff a moderate alcoholic kept around for his hobbies and side-projects.

Now a couple of boards resting over cinderblocks served as the front door steps. The sliding aluminum accordion panels which had hung precariously there before were now replaced by a proper door: one of those cheap hollow pinewood deals that almost begged to have a fist punched through it. The shed was situated about thirty yards from the back porch of the main house. The back of it stood about four feet from the chain link fence marking the rear perimeter of the yard. Beyond that was dense Arkansas woods standing in a carpet of dried leaves.

It was early October. For some reason, Rudy dreamed more intensely during this season. He sometimes wondered if it was because the planet tilted at just the right angle this time of year, causing his dreams to fall into his head from a kind of centripetal force. Just a week ago, he had dreamed that he had awoken in his bed out in the shed only to find the walls and ceiling were missing. Kind of like what happened to the kid in the white wolf pajamas from that Wild Things book.

Beyond his bed stretched the desolate forest. The main house was nowhere to be seen. There was no chain link fence. Rudy sat up to get a better look. The stars were out and the moon was three-quarters full, without a cloud in the nighttime sky. The forest surrounding made a lovely pattern of crisscrossing moonshadows along the ground. There appeared to be glowing gray-blue lichen crisscrossed along all the tree trunks themselves. The smell of pines was crisp and clear.

Rudy looked up and saw that strange glowing fungus grew on the trees as high up as he could see. He was surprised how well lit the outdoors was, this late at night. Every last detail was etched in this weird twilight, and underlined by shadow as if a contrast knob had been turned to achieve better focus. Pebbles along the ground, pine needles strewn before the bases of trees, dried mulchy leaves forming a rough bedspread across the ground: all of this was perfectly visible to the naked eye. Rudy noticed every detail, the split veins spreading across leaves, and he thought he noticed an insect scurrying from a curled leaf cover to an acorn's shade, and then disappear behind the small nut's tilted crown.

That was when he heard a deep bass sound. It prickled the hairs on his neck and set his heart beating quicker. It sounded like a forced exhalation accompanied by a meaty snort. Rudy whipped his head around to try and visualize the panorama of forest surrounding his lonely stage in the woods. The floor and steps leading down to the earthen yard were all that remained of his shed, along with the contents of his room: a desk with a Panasonic stereo set up on it. A couple of black RCA speakers served as looming bookends. The cord stemming from behind the stereo disappeared from view behind the desk, partially erased by the night. By the foot of the bed (to the left of where the door would have been) was a bookshelf stuffed with science fiction paperbacks. Rudy briefly wondered if the stereo would work. Then he heard the snapping of a twig directly behind him, about five feet beyond where the chain link fence behind the shed would have been.

That meant whatever was out there couldn't have been more than twelve feet away. Suddenly he could hear it panting. Rudy wasn't scared of dogs, any kind of dogs. He didn't care if it was an untamed wolf or a wandering coyote, they just didn't intimidate him. He perceived himself as an alpha male. For some reason though, his chest tightened up, and his heart beat faster. Maybe it was not a wolf or a dog. Maybe it was a man panting there. Rudy was too paralyzed to turn around and look. That's when he woke up, his sheets already kicked off the bed and his room back to normal, with the posters back on the walls and the cool green glow of the stereo panel indicating the time: 2:17 am. He looked over to the door. It was wide open. Some dried leaves had blown in.

The smell of autumn always reminded Rudy of used coffee grounds. He got up quickly and walked over to the open doorway. He could see the back porch of the main house thirty yards away in the distance. He shuddered from the chill and reached out to shut the flimsy door. Pushing the knob in and twisting it easily to lock it didn't offer any consolation. His heart rate would not slow down. Rudy stepped back into the center of his fragile room and stared ahead in the dark. So this is what it felt like to be a rake or a snow-shovel stored away in his stepfather’s shed.