Fixtion

Awake

2009-03-02T12:24:00.002-04:00

Well, hello my mystery. Today I awake again. Sleep slips away as I emerge from the waters, salt-stained. I saw the age-old rocks, cuddled together like hot embers beneath the waves, burning unabated. Warm-heart, warm-centre, a heat to bathe the creatures. No science has breached the foam, the fury of waves, the heavy calm. The weight of the ocean holds me. Oh, the tenderness. There are no sharp edges in Eden. But it is the shore, the meeting place of your choice, where we make a fire and eat fish. I am eating with you now. I am with you now. It is you now.

Fire Hydrant

2008-05-26T14:31:00.002-03:00

That sun, too bright, tracing destruction through the fibrous strands of his iris. Laying prone in the sand, wide-eyed and gaping at heaven. When horror comes, it chases you subjectively. You run, but it’s carried along inside you, so the epicenter of terror remains confusingly close and curling at your sternum. You think it’s out there, in the world, and if you can just get around the next corner, the next edge of whatever that large object is ahead, you might just be able to duck low and hide, quietly. But it’s not out there. It wasn’t outside of Ryan, either, not outside.

So he let the light in, the bright roaring sun. It could race through him and burn it out – the gut-fear, black and popping epileptic. But something else happened.

The searing rays of on high found the wide open compartments of his mind where meaning was kept. Meanings so full and young, unfettered and let free to roam around where they would, unprotected. They could not withstand the photonic flood, and they sang sharp and high choruses as they sintered out of existence. Ashy cinders collected in the dome of his head, piles of spent carbon.

When he woke his body remembered all the things it should: how to stand, to walk, to understand space. But his head had no binding reference around which to chain all of the objects appearing before him. There was only space, and places where space was not – curiously shaped bundles of occupied space. This is what happens when you lose meaning.

But the fire hydrant changed all that. It had a symmetry. And a hardness that was pleasing to his hands, a coolness that comforted. It was a beacon of promise, of greater things behind, and beneath, and maybe even above. He clutched it like a child, traced its shape with his fingers and whispered foreign syllables to it like an old wizard calling to life a breathless golem.

In time, strange occupied spaces that moved much too quickly came and took him away. No one ever could regain contact, though they tried, his brothers especially. If they knew, they would bring in the fire hydrant and begin there. For in a small dark room near the base of his skull, cuffed and bound and protected from all that could dare harm, is a little ember of meaning, glowing and alive, alone, full of potential.

Business Man: 7

2007-12-22T08:58:00.000-04:00

In a meeting. Taking the minutes. I’m writing these words instead of “Mr. Firewell inquires about a new lunch hour directive,” or “Ms. Claire shows her report for monthly profit – what’s that yellow stain on her sleeve?”, or “Bob chews his gum like a mad cow”. We’re sitting in the boardroom, which rests at the northwest corner of the building. Glass circumferences us, from floor to ceiling, and we have a broad view of the domain about us, the structures of power jutting up from the ground like quills, at their very tops antennae, syringes, pricking the sky with red and white winks. It is overcast. I hope for rain. Cathy smiles at me, she has told a joke, chuckles trickle out politely. She turns back to the overhead, her hair black silk swinging. Outside it is raining. I see the drops beginning to collect on the glass, peppering crystals. My daughter loves the rain. She’s running to the window right now, her finger touching the glass, her nose pressed up to the pane, she’s asking if she can go outside. The sitter concedes, and she puts on that pink outfit – pink boots, pink raincoat, pink umbrella. She’ll decide not to take the umbrella, and she’ll drink the sky with a tiny outstretched tongue, levelling her gaze once in a while to look at me and laugh. Look at the sitter and laugh. Chuckles offer themselves politely again, Cathy has told another joke, profits are up, the meeting is over, and the minutes, the fast-moving, slipping minutes are safely locked inside my laptop.

Kulkaran

2007-12-18T15:29:00.001-04:00

Kulkaran? Bound, but just now let loose into the ball field. This is his second trip to the Great City, a prisoner of the cocoa masters, but his nakedness is all glory and jungle oil as he walks across the grass, wooing the eyes of the crowd his way. There are other prisoners, but he does not look at them. He keeps his pantheric gaze firm on the team across the way: they are stone-armoured, feather-headdressed, jade-painted. At their feet, one ball. It might as well be the globe of the earth.

On both sides of the field high stone walls, lined with small loops, contain the players. Ball in loop, earth in void, and Kulkaran lives. Ah, but he is not like them, these stone makers. He has secrets collected in the net of his hair – caught as he passed through trees and under rivers and over mountains.

The match begins, and they have weapons. Kulkaran is lake-weed, hovering at the edges. There are fonts of blood, and prisoners dying, and a ball knocking around in the air, spin-struck.

Kulkaran sees an opening, and he is yellow adder, fang-striker, snagging the heel of a jade runner. He clamps upon him hawk-swift and taloned, removing the headdress and the armour, smearing the paint on his own body. Foot-stomp, face-crush, he dons the stolen outfit. He remembers the sting of the tree ant, and becomes pincer-toothed. He bites, and bites, and avoids the ball, biting. He is killing prisoners. He is gaining trust. He is standing by the crowd, smiling, red-tongued.

The ball comes towards him then, a rubber sparrow of speed. Now Kulkaran swats away the tree ant, and is tender-foot, the puma. He turns and warps his way forward, keeping the ball from touching his hands, powering up on pounding thighs and curling shoulder blades. Trickle-step, stutter, and thunder rolling on the field. Kulkaran heaves the middle name of lightning and throws it into the ball, rage-wise. Through the loop spinning is freedom; sweet, sacrificial freedom, burning cocoa in the morning sky.

Business Man: 6

2007-12-11T21:46:00.000-04:00

I’m in the kitchen darkness. The laptop is shouting light. My hands glow, tap-tap-tap. My daughter lies in bed, asleep, and I cannot describe the ache in my chest when I think of her. My suit is burning on me like an infection; I want to rip it off, get into some old jeans, into a t-shirt, barefoot, plain. I want to make Cheerios and waffles. I want to spill milk on the counter, I want to hear her coming down the stairs and saying my name. But there’s still four hours until dawn, when the sitter cracks the eggs and burns the toast, slides the paper in under the door, leaves. I’m the shadow-father. This is why my body falls only as imagination. I struggle to keep writing this. I stare at the last sentence for fattening seconds. My fingers are shaking. I’m squeezing them in, but they’re dripping, the tears. I’m in the kitchen darkness. She’s sleeping, and goodness reigns.

Fly

2007-12-11T21:28:00.000-04:00

For sport, nothing beat cloud diving. He manoeuvred his twin-engine upwards, tugging on the throttle-bar. One hand flashed out to grab his sunglasses – big round reflective things – and he pushed them on his face. Up, up, pressed against the back of the seat, gravity pulling him gently, stretching his face. It felt as though he were pushing through something dense, like jelly.

A wall of white enveloped him and muffled the engines. So slow now, and the roaring, high-pitched and throated. He could see the iron pistons, hammering, the combusting gas an infinite stream of fire and vanishing heat. He punched on the radio and turned it up full blast.

When he broke, mist trailing off her wings, he let out an adrenal whoop of joy. For a moment he rose suspended, almost going nowhere, the engines beginning to stall. He pushed her forward and levelled her off. Out before him, forested, vast acreages of tumbling cumulus lay frozen in time, sun-sprayed. It was almost another land, and he could not help but thinking that there were indeed people up here, living in the slow-changing landscape, cloud-bound. To the left a great ridge of rolling puff could have been mountains or cliffs. Straight ahead were foothills and curling embankments, hiding invisible rivers of air, where those who lived here spent their days catching slippery wind-fish, or netting packets of flashing light. To the right a hallway of bursting trees vaulted cathedral-like, heavy-laden with sky-fruit, ambrosial, oranges of oxygen balling on branches of white smoke. And directly below – a field, ribbed into rows, hiding the seeds of heaven.

He prepared himself for a dive.

But just ahead something caught his attention. Two tendrils, maybe three, twisting on the field. They were moving quicker than the landscape, almost detached from the surroundings. He arced the plane in their direction, turning down the radio. As he approached they began to shrink, melting down into the rest of the clouds. Curiosity scampered up his shoulder, bit his ear, spoke sharp nothings.

And that! A shimmering flash of black! Almost mirror-like, a glistening scale. He dropped her into a dive, his heart racing. The tendrils appeared again, bobbing, then slipped back beneath the surface. “What the hell is going…” he spoke aloud, but his voice caught in his throat.

An impossibility.

Endless rows of jagged teeth. A wide and bottomless pink throat, billowing. A tongue, forked, lashing the air. Two caverns, nostrils, and above those a pair of reptilian eyes, milky and cold. He tried to pull her up, but the engines shrieked in refusal, and he screamed his way down into the end of the world.

Daily Roach: Mar. 29th

2006-03-29T11:08:00.000-04:00

My half-finished world is full of four-foot doors and roads that end where, if I had gone but a bit further, may have run the earth through the iron mountains, beyond a craggy sea and towards the settled sun, into a home of warm lights and spicy meals.

Daily Roach: Mar. 28th

2006-03-29T11:06:00.000-04:00

Pain came, that single note, pure and high.

Daily Roach: Mar. 27th

2006-03-27T06:47:00.000-04:00

Who knew that truth was but a by-product of will, that the only absolute was an absolute will? - the bear knew.

Business Man: 5

2006-03-26T21:04:00.000-04:00

I’ve got it – it’s ant hills. These buildings, I mean, they’re all ant hills. What I can’t figure out is where the Queen is hiding. Oh, wait. I know – she’s in my wallet, she’s in the vaults, she’s glowing in green letters on my screen, she’s worn on our lips like chap-stick, she slides out suddenly inside a froth of cologne, pushing her way up our noses. She’s making our mouths water, rising steamy out of the lobster bisque. She lives in the tiny droplets of white wine, she’s the ticking of my watch, the part in my hair, the pattern on my tie, my smile, my handshake, my stance, and she comes up welling like a slowly mounting song from beneath the layered fears of a purposeless existence, saving us at the last moment from insanity, abolishing and then inhabiting that blasphemous question: “why?”. Oh, that’s why. When we lose our way she gathers up our things and wraps her slender arm around ours, guiding us back like a child to the truth of prosperity. The means justifies the ends, she says, and then I understand. Meaninglessness justifies the ending. Do you see my body falling?

Daily Roach: Mar. 25th

2006-03-25T14:59:00.000-04:00

He was born in the mud, and so even in his castle - food-bound, sophisticated - he remembered the taste of dirt, the smell of earth, and that his ending would be the very same as his beginning.

Daily Roach: Mar. 24th

2006-03-24T06:39:00.000-04:00

Oh secret city, I've found your doors by the spread of the compass, centered and circumferenced at the meeting place between soul and spirit.

Daily Roach: Mar. 23rd

2006-03-23T07:07:00.000-04:00

That morning he rose counter-clockwise, moving against the flow of time, a dissident in the current of the universe, tired.

Daily Roach: Mar. 22nd

2006-03-22T21:49:00.000-04:00

So down came fatigue, a fat ghost who draped itself around his frame, gravity moaning.

Daily Roach: Mar. 21st

2006-03-21T07:18:00.000-04:00

I have no hope save hope, and this staff, and this way of walking.

Daily Roach: Mar. 20th

2006-03-21T07:07:00.000-04:00

I am told the walk is cold, the one to the grave, yet here I am bare-footed.

Business Man: 4

2006-03-19T21:36:00.000-04:00

I’m in Café Trezor, below the Building, where we come in droves, one per table with laptop and caffeine, all our chairs facing the big bay windows. It’s the street outside that takes our eyes when we lift them up for apparent thought. We don’t think, but we pretend to, and after a few minutes of watching crowds and cars, bow our heads to write or tap away at the keyboard. We’re working. Mouse-wheels wheeling. There’s a thug standing on the cold street, his big frame covered by half a cow of a red leather jacket, his head rounded by a black toque. He has a goatee and a thick jaw, but I can’t see his face because his back is to us. His hands are in his pockets. He’s big. He’s poor, because he’s asking people for change. He’s not cold, though his breath plumes at every request. He’s a hulk of heat. And he scares those he appeals for help. All of us are using him as a distraction from work, we look up at him instead of the street, at his great shoulders and dominating mass. And we thank God for civilization. We thank Him because we live in this era, and not an earlier one, where the man outside with no money would never ask: he would take, he would make certain, he would demand himself into wealth, exercise his peasantry into kinghood, into rule. But he’s trapped in this epoch. The Building above him towers with a potency he cannot match. It contends with the sky, the great up-wheres, while he contends with the miserly, the small ones, the little folk he could crush or command had he been born several hundred years earlier. Here, put a sword in his hand. Apply scars, popping, on his face. Let the dirt sit on him from nights on the battlefield. Pour the oil of ability over his head, watch his will rise up rage-wise, let the crown of competence glow upon his brow with brilliance and myth and fire. Don’t worry, we’ve got crisp white shirts of armour. It’s the twenty-first century, and the great men have been stripped of legend. The dragons are dead, the mammoth extinct, and the power of the body proved weightless against the power of Organization.

Daily Roach: Mar. 19th

2006-03-19T20:58:00.000-04:00

It has been made complex, grown viral because of a thirst for knowledge, but simplicity still surrounds life, permeates the marrow, giving it that glow.

Daily Roach: Mar. 18th

2006-03-18T08:21:00.000-04:00

I see her after the news, my eyes fat and red with tears, through a blinding flash of foliage which are twenty and seven years, standing in the present clearing, the sun coming down on her old and mighty face, my grandmother, mother grand, with cancer, and smiling.

Daily Roach: Mar. 16th

2006-03-16T07:10:00.000-04:00

Cynicism is settled complacency, the oil field, attempting intelligence, burning.

Daily Roach: Mar. 15th

2006-03-15T07:38:00.000-04:00

That growing acreage was a splitting seed, a dying bird, the ascent of worms.

Daily Roach: Mar. 14th

2006-03-14T07:28:00.000-04:00

One day the pale white face that inhabits the shadow will meet the broad, golden brow that lives in the sun; a romance will occur, and possibly a great work of fiction, though they'll swear it was just a conversation.

Daily Roach: Mar. 13th

2006-03-13T14:13:00.000-04:00

One hour ago, sixty minutes lay waiting by the fire, a neat pile of kindling; now it glows, having burned, scatter-packed cinders, brightening on your breath.

Business Man: 3

2006-03-12T08:06:00.000-04:00

I won’t stifle you with the lack thereof’s in this building. That would be a lazy stream of knowledge, a bouquet of grass when here and there amongst the blades are yet to be found dandelions, bursting yellow. My boss is having an affair. No. All the bosses are having affairs. All the bosses are having affairs with each other. And they all think they are isolated Casanovas, Secret Unique’s, sharp packets of forbidden pleasure in thousand dollar business-wear. Little do they know that the degrees of separation connecting all the shapes of their DNA number less than three. Now listen. All of them coagulated into one person, The Boss, a network of sinew and thought idiotic, like Frankenstein, Bankenstein, only more stupid. In love with itself. No wonder they go to the bathroom so often. The mirrors. Especially James, whose glassy eyes must re-reflect an infinity of self-images; i am, I am, I Am, I AM. He thinks he Is because he Has, and we all agree without uttering a word. We advertise accord with smiles and palm sweat and padded laughter. Funny how watches and shoes validate princes. How car and suit proclaim domain, how logo makes us swoon. I shouldn’t bring up Sheep, but cliché coats every fabric of my office, sluices off every wet and shiny discussion, popping sour and curling up tangy at each dropped syllable, a billion worthless pennies.

Daily Roach: Mar. 11th

2006-03-11T12:56:00.000-04:00

Today she is one word, the orange honeysuckle against the dull brown, but tomorrow she is the epic, our forest of rain.

Daily Roach: Mar. 10th

2006-03-11T12:54:00.000-04:00

My marriage, a scandalous affair.

Daily Roach: Mar. 9th

2006-03-09T12:56:00.000-04:00

You may draw a line, but on neither side is to be found "to each their own".

Daily Roach: Mar. 8th

2006-03-08T22:12:00.000-04:00

My thought is a gray train in morning fog, indistinguishable but loud.

Daily Roach: Mar. 7th

2006-03-08T07:03:00.000-04:00

I awake from fever-dream, brow-burnt, the morning a cold, clear splash of water.

Daily Roach: Mar. 6th

2006-03-06T20:25:00.000-04:00

I pluck one world at a time, my eyebrows a dark and inconvenient galactic highway.

Business Man: 2

2006-03-05T10:57:00.000-04:00

Cathy is scratching her gums with a pen. She is scraping off the plaque. Her coffee is steaming on her desk, and the light of her computer monitor beams off her face. She is holy in the ambient darkness. The main power is out. She doesn’t care, none of them do, it happens all the time. I’m just watching, I can’t help but clench my jaw, which clenches when I haven’t quite figured out the meaning of a present moment. People keep walking by quickly; I can feel the wind of them on my hair every time they pass. Why do they whisper? Listen. It’s the strength of day in us, which we’ve prolonged with electric bulb, which we’ve taken and pushed and packaged into places where it rightly does not belong. The day is our product, the flag-ship commodity that we sell each other, our import and export, the herald of human right, the god of prosperity. We command the day, and we have no respect for it. Now night comes, and the maiden frights. Night comes, and adult mastery fades into the intuition of children: the world is big, and our existence is luxury. Let’s appease it quietly, with whispers, with quick and silent movements, and be holy while we can, for day dawns while we are good. When the power comes back this office will be generous and thankful for twenty-nine minutes. Cathy will go and get everyone doughnuts. Jokes will flutter about, spring-time birds, as smiles settle and melt on us like thawing ice. And then someone will make a mistake. A touch of anger will blossom, whisking in a field of summer, and heat, and mastery, and the long, long day of confident business.

Daily Roach: Feb. 4th

2006-03-04T20:53:00.000-04:00

They carried the stories like pollen, golden globes tucked beneath their arms, there to rub off and come loose against the minds of foreigners, a rich and thirsty soil.

Daily Roach: Mar. 3rd

2006-03-03T22:21:00.000-04:00

Coins, interesting little notions of security.

Daily Roach: Mar. 2nd

2006-03-03T22:19:00.000-04:00

Hold back the sentiment, and with the other arm let loose the inquisitive child.

Daily Roach: Mar. 1st

2006-03-01T22:38:00.000-04:00

They're roots, secret gnarls exposed at hidden deeps, fat-fingered fists with spider-leg hair.

Daily Roach: Feb. 28th

2006-02-28T22:42:00.000-04:00

Across the night-sky winking, spark-tailed, the sparrow of fire flew a sudden and gentle arc of light.

Daily Roach: Feb. 27th

2006-02-27T07:04:00.000-04:00

Nothing so belittles and then realigns the artistic ideal as the practicalities of life: a mother's shout or a father's belt, the hungry stomach or the frozen fingers, a creeping financial debt or a broken ATM card.

Business Man: 1

2006-02-26T18:45:00.000-04:00

Listen. I’m at the top of a fifty storey high-rise with my laptop. I’m tapping out the letters that make up these words, and I can see a body falling down, down, down, off the edge of a stone half-wall, which I happen to be standing on, my black shoes bright as spit in the sun, my dress pants dancing absurdly in the chemical wind of this frantic city. Yeah, the body is mine. The imagination, too, and there I go splat, though I’ve fabricated the sound of it. The wind is so loud up here, blowing radiation right into my ear drums. A crowd gathers, little specks of volcanic sand collecting on a cement frying pan, momentarily made motionless, and certainly less stupid. I can see the sirens all the way from five blocks down, but I can’t hear them for this blasted hurricane. Emergency! No, listen. It hasn’t happened, I’m just imagining it, but I’m doing it because work accomplishes the same thing. It’s all politics. No, that’s cliché, lemme’ explain that. It’s perceptual positioning – desk-jockey hockey, all grim and brimstone gossip, but as calm and clinical as elective surgery. We’ve all voted for insanity. It’s not as though we have no choice, we keep on voting, as we assemble the morning’s data and slosh it around like mouthwash, as we spit it out into meaningless report after report, as we graph every conceivable variable on the face of earth to fluff up presentations (I’ve thought of graphing graphs, but no one would get it). “So yes, it seems as though Fart is rising far more quickly than Burp, as you can see by this jutting red line here, and this sagging blue line here.” Do you see my body falling now? So we are in agreement. The inaudible sirens, the state of emergency, brain splatter on the light post, and just another morning.

Daily Roach: Feb. 25th

2006-02-25T09:45:00.000-04:00

In a casual turn of events, the world ended.

Daily Roach: Feb. 24th

2006-02-24T07:38:00.000-04:00

I caught a fish from the river, trapped a burnished and bright-scaled year from the relentless rush of geologic history.

Daily Roach: Feb. 23rd

2006-02-23T07:26:00.000-04:00

No word, no thought, no emotion; all willpower typing, and then a sudden period.

Daily Roach: Feb. 22nd

2006-02-22T07:30:00.000-04:00

The ache had settled in the slabs of his muscles, a grainy burn, and a reminder that he'd been born an old, old man.

Daily Roach: Feb. 21st

2006-02-21T07:30:00.000-04:00

"Intolerable," he muttered, puttered as he cleaned up their mess, a quiet little machine running on the petrol of his resolve.

Daily Roach: Feb. 20th

2006-02-20T07:44:00.000-04:00

The day dawned sun-thwarted, half-lit, a gray re-run.

Witness

2006-02-19T08:34:00.000-04:00

copyright (c) Jonathan M. Dobson

THIS IS THE STORY OF HOW JASON GOT AWAY WITH MURDER, committing the act as it were in the middle of a busy mall, with one hundred people watching, and cameras too. A reader might find lesson in this tale, or she might not: the justice is in the telling, for it must be known, this crime, and its rendering will force all those who look at it to take up the mantle of judge, the axe of the executioner, or, in plausible turn, the role of disbeliever. Probable doubt is the spirit of our law, and therefore that pestering ghost will haunt you as you read, (touch upon you now at its mentioning), and come in full force after you have finished – whispering, high on advice, bobbing its head sagely and disappearing when you give a mental nod of consent.

**

Jason was possessed with the conviction that he was the Center. Of the universe. I say possessed because it overtook him at tea-time, and he fell to the ground sputtering with the cerebral weight of it. He was quite the sight, on all fours of Langdon Hall’s hardwood floor, spilt tea soaking the knees of his dress pants, and he, mouth dripping and agape, staring sightlessly through a collection of elderly ladies. His fortuitous revelation implied several things, important things, things that we shall consider presently, but chiefly that such wondrous knowledge (though destiny, he asserts now) was dangerous. If men in power discovered his centrality, he might be used to dark purpose. He assumed, of course, that as the center of the universe he was imbued with certain powers. One, he was practically invincible. Two, he was virtuous beyond compare. Three, he knew all, understood all, and only had to remember. Four, he was always right. Five, the natural world, through circumstance or perhaps even direct intervention, would seek to hide and protect him. This last was particularly appealing, for he had always felt himself attuned to nature, to rock and soil, tree and grass, and thus his revelation could be substantiated by a history of such secret emotion. Not that he had ever pursued an outdoor life. He was retired at twenty-five, with a board of director’s title in a relinquished tech start-up he founded three years past. But if politicians or other demons of opportunity should discover his bright secret, then his powers might be used for evil. They could plumb his mind and soul for illicit knowledge; could harness his innate divinity to turn the world into a State of Personal Whim; could establish a hierarchy of tyranny upon the foundation of his indomitable blood – a substance assuredly potent in things arcane and powerful. He understood all this instantly as he soaked up tea through his knees. He understood that his financial security, acquired at such a young age, attested to his position in the cosmological monarchy.

“I’m a king,” he said, at once relishing the idea.

**

Now Sarah is an altogether different sort of person. She had a revelation too, although hers proclaimed that she was worthless. Mud. (It was perhaps her father and mother who, over fourteen years of constant howling, drove this belief into her, but she had had her own moment of spontaneous light, where resulting casts of shadows confirmed her inferiority, and so she believed.) She was lower than the field mouse, and thus exaggerated its nervousness, her hands and eyes full of twitches, her mind always taking note of the general surroundings and prevalent escape routes. She was smaller than the fly, and so walked with a tenuous, uncertain gait, never following a straight line, always changing directions, only achieving rest (and it was an achievement) when she stopped to sit. Sitting she learned from dust, for she was even smaller than that, and learned to move when the big and great strode by, learned to be disturbed by the impossible motions of massive others, learned to sit only when no one was around, and even then she would fall gently, more gently than dust, and more quiet too. You might think it default now for her to be an ascetic, and you would be wrong. She was not a loner. She was a full-person, with a full life and full thoughts. But how could a being like her have a life at all? The Internet.

Oh, you see now, don’t you, how she could be less than dust and yet as large and horrifically organized as pyramid. There were no faces on the Internet, and when she entered chat rooms she was not only monumental, but queen. She could type faster than anyone, and when in front of the screen, her mind came alive like a hibernating creature, shaking and starving after long seclusion, a bright sort of flower that bloomed red and bloody, rosy with intent. She of course made her living off of the Internet, the Webmaster of several sites, paid through direct wire to her bank account.

After this she becomes quite the typical recluse – food delivered to her door, in love with television characters, her phone empowered with call display, and her windows made purposeless by thick, black blinds. There are other typical things, but they are of small consequence.

**

As you can see, I have populated this story with both king and queen. They don’t know each other, and never will, save as fictional instances in your mind, poorly copied artifices of poorly crafted literature. Concepts. That’s it. But concepts don’t kill each other, and the king of this (true) story kills a queen.

**

The center of the universe had amnesia. He could not remember all that he knew. Slip-streams, the fire burning, a star made of glass, shimmering portraits, dark fields. He endeavored through random mental gluttony to stir up images and knowledges. It was his reasoning that the universe was infinite, and if he was its center, and its circumference was nowhere, then he was everywhere. Knowledge was inexhaustible, which meant that not only did anything conceived exist, but any conception existed an infinite amount of times. There was not one Jason, but a billion-billion Jasons. More. So random thoughts, though seemingly inane, were valid sources of true knowledge. And if his reasoning were flawed, then the very act of thinking something would make it be.

Nightmare took him, however, (razorblade, black snow and upwards rain) because he had wondered if he was flawed. If the center of the universe was aware of itself, and conceived that it might be flawed, then it was indeed flawed for having the initial thought, or if not flawed, had thus then made itself so. Oh silent night, he fell into null, and like a fallen star he raged against the descent. Anger took him, and the only way he could cling to his monarchy was to lie to himself. And so he did.

I am the center. I must be. I will it to be. If I can will it, then I must be the center.

Well, you see the obvious cyclical path of this insanity. His five powers – invincibility, ultimate virtuousness, omniscience, righteousness, and affinity with nature – were one by one proven false, and in that order. The first was a simple cut to his finger, and he bled his potent blood onto the floor, all over his invincibility. The second was a small lie to his mother, a white lie really, but then lies don’t truly have color. His curiosity proved the bane of his omniscience – how could he be curious about something, if he knew everything? He lost a game of hockey pickup with his buddies, and his righteous white-feathered wings wilted to brown, soggy knots of shame at his shoulders. The last – he fell from a tree, which had not only failed to save him, but had neglected to protect him from a dangling wasps nest – made him hate nature, thereby cutting off that assured affinity, a severed third arm protruding from his back. And yet.

I am the center. It was his faith, you see.

Needless to say, the rage that had brought him to his deception sustained him in it. His power was in his anger, at times a cool and relishing tuber or worm, at other times a shard of pure senselessness, the kind that destroys. The politicians and demons of opportunity never did find him (he attributed this to nature’s help), but he found them. Let them think they can use me, was his thought. I will use them.

For all of his divinity, Jason was yet a man of the world. There was a mall in the city, a despicable place of mortal activity, he felt, but a place he needed to go to buy clothes. Besides, they could all see him, touch him with their eyes, behold him. It was a matter of responsibility and duty: the center of the universe should walk amongst its peoples. BMW with the top down, iced cappuccino, credit card, 140 in a 100 zone, the wind of the universe washing through the universe of his hair.

**

In a play the trivial actor’s costume is just as important as the lead role’s. Sarah was frumpish, to be sure, her hair tangled and that dull brown color so common among bit characters. But she knew when to buy new clothes. The problem with the whole need was that one had to try articles on before purchasing them. Ordering outfits over the Internet was useless. Sizes were not standardized, nor registered components of the ISO.

By now you see where this is going. You can imagine Sarah leaving her house, a frail particle amongst behemoths, her infinitesimal presence inside the long steel cave of the bus, her ears in the company of lightning and sharp thunder as the vehicle screeches and protests at each stop, the blur that is her vision as when very small things see the limited surface of objects too large to grasp, even in peripheral. You could pray for her, if you wish, as she must distinguish her stop, as she must navigate through the cathedral-like pathways of the mall, dodging colossal strangers and looking for that particular glow, the blue glow of the Ashton Ladies Wear sign, for she mistakes it for the food court entryway every time. You could pray, oh you could pray, for she must not make that mistake this time, for if she does a king awaits her, an impatient and angry monarch who has no time for mice or flies or dust, though he claims to be their sovereign.

**

You could pray. But this tale is post-mortem, and time travel has not been invented yet. Or the invention of time has not yet been fully traveled, one of the two. So this meeting must occur, will occur. And you must read it no matter if you cringe or desire not to. I know. I desired the same thing, but then I was sitting there, eating at a table in the food court, even as it happened.

**

You could see his impatience from afar, a translucent and transforming film that twisted his features at each delay, made him clench his fists when he got stuck behind an elderly cane-walker, or mother and baby-stroller, or impertinent teenager stopping to gawk at something. He was hungry. That was why he was coming to the food court, to grace his presence among us plebes, we motes of mortality, that we could watch him eat. Then you could see her fear from afar, she in her stained clothes, the small eyes shifting and shifting and shifting. She moved so slowly, and he moved so fast, far behind her, a boiling storm that rained upwards. Their trajectories were inevitable. The king back there, coming on strong like a warhorse, the queen up here, almost beside my table, the probing snail. Oh, I saw it; I saw it all happen before it happened (and thus precognition exempts me from judge and executioner and disbeliever, those roles are for you.)

He was trying to get through the throng.

She managed to well up some courage and take a step. In front of him.

He ran into her.

She gasped, for words were not permitted her, so small was she compared to the center of the universe.

His eyes lit up.

I remember dropping my fries.

He spoke, a roar: “MOVE!”

A shard of anger detached itself from him, snagged and pulled by that one awful word, becoming substantial in the space between them. His seething sent it to her, and oh we both know how slow she was. It struck her in the back, she jumped, found her voice then, but it was an unintelligible chirp-scream with no words in it.

Then she moved, but her soul before her body. It leapt out of her with a snap, an uprising droplet of shadow-water, and her body fell, but not like dust, not so insignificantly – hard and profound and complete at the end of my table. There were one hundred witnesses, I among them, and cameras, and the center of the universe itself, though he stepped over her and kept walking.

**

There was no touch, no direct physical contact, and so evidences could not be gathered, or laws challenged, or crimes duly tried. Though innocence had not been declared, it was yet permitted to function. (Later he had won ton soup, thai noodles, and an extra large coke.) It was as though nothing had happened. There is, in fact, no Jason and no Sarah. It must also be admitted that Jason is not the center of the universe. You are. And I, a queen of another sort, revolve quietly around the mental sun of your mind, a particle briefly examined, the transitions of my orbit dictated by the speed and accuracy of your reading. You see, you are about to kill me. Therefore I appeal to you as judge, exhort you as executioner, and command you as disbeliever to destroy this work - lest I die again every time you set yourself upon this text. Where Jason destroys with the shouting of a final word, you destroy with the reading of one. Our meeting is not altogether different either: we join in a busy, cavernous room, where a throng of people-thoughts witness, where cameras of a neural sort record (some say never forgetting a thing that transpires), each of us on different missions, I to bring forth an impending crime, you to consume a good story. You are large and all, and I cannot comprehend you. I am small and, perhaps now, cliché or abrasive or immature. I can, however, exert some small crux of power, a power granted to me by your designs, your ways of constructing letters and scripts and copies of letters and scripts. I can choose what word you read last. And I choose that to be you.

copyright (c) Jonathan M. Dobson

Daily Roach: Feb. 18th

2006-02-18T11:24:00.000-04:00

I saw you collecting sea-shells, alabaster hope, your hair a dense wave of brown on the wind, a thick and viable chocolate in the unending breeze.

Daily Roach: Feb. 17th

2006-02-17T07:58:00.000-04:00

Sadness struck formidable, a great mountain, then simmered into grief, a puddle.

Daily Roach: Feb. 16th

2006-02-16T07:32:00.000-04:00

Eloquence without meaning is the plump drug of the dying.

Daily Roach: Feb. 15th

2006-02-15T07:40:00.000-04:00

On words he came walking, syllable-stride and grammar-grin, his rhetoric a machine gun of run-on sentences.

Daily Roach: Feb. 14th

2006-02-14T07:08:00.000-04:00

Her heart fluttered, an anxious bird of flight, imagination taken and let loose amongst the clouds, the air, the heights.

Daily Roach: Feb. 13th

2006-02-13T22:06:00.000-04:00

Disease gives Death athlete's legs so she can win the race.

Miss Pneumonia

2006-02-12T08:42:00.000-04:00

Miss Pneumonia decided to come over, in tow her miserable children, to occupy the house of my body for an undetermined amount of time. The children, you see, love the many rooms of this house, and as soon as they arrive, spread out across my humble mansion in search of their favourite corners. One is particularly keen on the chamber of my throat. He has just experienced a rather exciting soccer game, and so forgetting to take off his cleats runs around my oesophagus, cutting up the floor and pretending he is still back in the game. Two nasty ones have a taste for the vaulted ceilings of my lungs. They are running up and down the maze-like stairs, stomping and shrieking and full of glee. There is a big fat one who eats too much sweets, and he prefers the dome of my head. He is a little dumb, too, so he just bounces around in there, directing his uncompromising mass against the gelatinous walls of my skull. There are twins in my ears, one to each side. They are yet babes, and they are crying and kicking for food, so that every once and a while a tiny foot strikes the eardrum and makes the whole house boom. Several have collected in various muscles, and they wander from place to place, deciding to test the walls every once in a while with a well-timed punch or an unexpected jab of the elbow. (They forget ever being here before, and so are trying their hardest to remember through total immersion therapy.) A tenfold tribe has taken to the circumference of my eyes, five to each pupil, and they gather around the grey light of my irises, there lying down to sleep and press their weight against the floor, so that the eyelids never cease drooping, and my normal visage is changed from one who is awake to one who cannot decide. I hate them. Perhaps the most disconcerting of all is that I cannot find Miss Pneumonia. Every time I explore a room that I am certain she occupies, she at once disappears. I wish to solicit her, you see, so that I can determine how long she plans to stay. I would offer her tea. I would offer her crumpets. I would offer her anything, so long as she leaves. But she remains aloof, unseen, as though in her absence she ensures the keeping of the living place of her children, delighting and joying in them as only a mother can.

Daily Roach: Feb. 11th

2006-02-11T08:49:00.000-04:00

In autumn he played with fire, and under a harvest moon burned.

Daily Roach: Feb. 10th

2006-02-10T07:56:00.000-04:00

Some electric spark sent it, a moment after the flare of the cherry bulbs: a high and ambitious siren climbing the sky and cascading over the grass like the wail of a great soprano, full and sure and pure from lungs fat and slack and wet.

Daily Roach: Feb. 9th

2006-02-09T07:38:00.000-04:00

He had dish-pan hands, creased by the waters of time, wrinkled in seas of rippling seconds.

Daily Roach

2006-02-08T07:27:00.000-04:00

Let me tell you of it; but no, my lips freeze, my saliva is a thickening concrete.

Daily Roach

2006-02-07T07:26:00.000-04:00

A dark road curls off into the night, a brunette strand of danger.

Daily Roach

2006-02-06T07:32:00.000-04:00

He held his hand up to the glory; opaque orange leaf, shadow-vein, capped with five smooth stones.

A Hibernation of Sense (The Harbor of Pearls)

2006-02-05T08:04:00.000-04:00

“Dey sings me a song, and I sing along.”
And so here we begin the tale of Melchizedek the fisherman, with his bleeding gums and rocky skin; his peppery stubble sharp enough to shred the delicate hands of them touchy folk; his black, black eyes and his parasitic, lichen-tossed hair. God bless his nasty soul.
The tides were running with the moon that night, full as it was, staring down at Melchizedek while he baited his traps beside the upturned belly of the Shifty Lady. The broken shells around his callused feet were the white teeth of raped organisms he’d gutted from Oceana’s fair womb, and while he spun his knots and spat his spittle, the Song of the Destroyer crackled like brush-fire beneath the soft, virulent folds of his butcher-shot mind.
“Dey can comes, dey can scuttle down here on ‘dah backs a’ demons, but I ain’t movin’ my Shifty Lady.”
Given the size of the moon, the creatures would be crawling and the sand-runner’s running. And Melchizedek – the vicious, the malicious – would never miss an opportunity for such slaughter. The singing salt spray eddied around the sensitized wound of his sea-heart, and when the water was calling, nothing could stop him from joining in on the lusty swoon.
“Dey can comes, dey can flutter down here on ‘dah wings o’ gulls, but I ain’t movin’ my Shifty Lady.”
They’d first cluttered around the splintered doors of his home the same day that he’d decided never again to answer to strangers. That family with the little dog had convinced him of the stupidity of mankind, yippin’ and yappin’ like they were making the sun rise every morning. He wore the pup’s paw now, round his neck on a string of parched seaweed.
“We need this harbour, Mr. Brady, and we are willing to offer you a sizable amount of money. You can have a villa anywhere you want on the entire eastern coast! Come now, let’s not be unreasonable. This is a very big island. Can we at least talk?”
There were three of them, and the one with the hat had been cut before they’d decided to leave Melchizedek alone. Comin’ down here to ‘dah Lady lookin’ like ebony devil-urchins in d’ose army suits, shaved and smellin’ like purdy parfume! Not one scratch on their prissy-hands, either, with hair slick like an oil spill and skin as pale and clean as dried tuna bone.
“May ‘dah sun burn ‘em pink!”
Across the negative, star-pricked canvas of the sky-night winking, the sound of flush-red lobster and white-bellied crab shuffled in time to the terrible tune lapping against the inner flesh of his head.

You are the destroyer,
indestructible you.

He shimmied the rancorous pellet-bait into his wooden cages, and humming aloud the dark shibboleth that simmered within, shoved his algae-frosted rowboat onto the porpoising surface of his sea. Paddles slapped the water, and self-echoing bubbles skimmed the liquid earth with the rainbow-refracted light of moonray. But being beyond the poeticism of coerced nature, or beneath it, Melchizedek sucked the blood out of his gums and refused to acknowledge the aesthetic beauty of Gaia’s great Pond.
The flickering, torch-lit eye-windows of the Shifty Lady teased him like a lover as he distanced himself from her. She wanted to smell the rank fish-odor of dying life as much as he did, and though he was sane enough not to draw such abstract lines of personality in her, he couldn’t resist the way she glared at him – all fire and light and violence. He ached to kiss her. The army men would not touch her while he breathed, and he swore with a spray of spittle that if the tender curves of her prow were ever harmed, he would release his Hell and destroy their world.

You are the destroyer,
indestructible you.

Sensing the abundance of the depths beneath him, and feeling in his gut the soft movements that betrayed imminent prey, he let his traps sink beneath the black water – his dark angels, his hungry spirits. Then he settled back against the hard planks of his boat and pretended to eat the stars; pincer fingers extracting them from the sky one by one. As he feasted on diamonds and waited for time to reap a field of victims, the sneaking, slithering snake of sleep slid over his eyes and turned him to the Other side.

The tracings of bright that highlighted all things of his world revealed to him that he dreamed. The tiny, reverberating rivulets in the water were covered with sparks, and the clouds too, defined and sharp with sparks. Melchizedek cursed. He rued dreams, especially daytime dreams, for they reminded him of his mother – that white witch of blessed spirit and spider-soft hair. She loved the day. Melchizedek hated it. The bright and the sparks and the twisting anxiety in his ravenous gut proved all the more that she had some part in this dream.

You are the destroyer,
indestructible you.

The Song still crackled, and from that he drew hope. Yanking his frayed trap-lines from the water, hand over hand, he whispered in time and nearly dropped the traps back down into oblivion. They were covered in clumps of mussels – barnacle-specked protrusions that gleamed with sparks.
The Song slithered under his stomach.
A low rumble breathed out from his pores, shook the boat, and letting go the lines Mechilzadek turned to the south. The Song had changed, and with that change he understood that it played not from within him, but from a far away vast place where he and creation could not go. The bright intensified, the sparks fused into lines that traced each rivulet and sharpened each water-point.

You are the destroyer,
indestructible you.

“No, me’s not!” Mechilzadek stood in his boat. The rumble grew. “No me’s not! You are!” he accused, stabbing a scarred finger at the horizon. The ground of his boat wobbled, and as he fell back into its bosom he saw the stars fizzle as the rumble now roared.
He caught glimpse of their bloodied faces, teethed and wet, but squeezed his eyelids shut. Dragonspawn after dragon screamed over him; rumble-screams, like the kind he imagined death would make. Fiends! Primordial and real, the fiends!
The world-devil roars at you. Oh, his mother’s words would come like that, scraped up out of closed memory, revelated at the moment of their truth. He opened his eyes, and again saw the metal dragons – awful and all and spitting fire, the repetitious sound of hate.
The lecherous, disconcerting wail of lesser demons sounded from the shore. Pain and horror compounded on pain and horror. Mechilzadek shook and spat out the stars he had tried to swallow; they had caught in his teeth, and he’d been reveling in the small scratches they made across his inner cheeks.
And the dragon sung

I am the destroyer,
indestructible me.

All around him were boats now, thousands of them, bobbing and burning and crackling. Men were in the water, some of them dead and seeping, others alive and also seeping. So numerous they became that they clogged the water. One rolled over and thumped against the boat, and at the recognition of the face upon that burnt dead his fear capsized into terror.
His face. His very own – his rocky skin, his peppery stubble, and even there as the face grimaced in frozen cessation were the same bleeding gums. No, worse. All of them had his face, all of the dead or dying; those ending corpses, a conglomeration of fleshy buoys upturned or overturned and turning red as the crimson sheen of blood and firelight washed over them like a visual wind.
Across this roiling labyrinth he saw the flickering eye-windows of the Shifty Lady.
How it could be that he saw the truth of his love rise up out of her like flames, he did not know. But there it rose, pluming from her blown out prow, billowing like an open flower, red and raw and screaming at the pain of release. Oh, Melchizedek did not love – that was not love, that wasn’t life surging from her rotted insides.
“Me hates you,” he croaked, a twisted sob catching and squeezing his throat. “Me’s not in love, me’s in hate...!”
With the horrible abomination of a fiend spitting flame into his chest, the dream split apart and dissipated like a drained cloud.

He dove like a spear between the calamities of two invisible corpses, breaking open a legion of invisible watery sparks. He kicked as the sea entered his lungs, welcoming the pain like a last draught of liquor. He curled in upon himself. His rotted clothes burst open, and across the rents his skin crackled and hardened into black shell. Barnacles replaced his eyes, and then the entirety of his stubbled chin. It was the look on her face that had made him do it – the betrayed look of an avenging seductress – and although he felt the fear of her at the nape of his neck, it was more the cataclysmic horror of betrayal that had caused his splintering. There was no repair for Melchizedek, no restitution and no respite.
A sundering so utter demands transformation. Requires Resurrection.
“Aye, mother...aye.”

Daily Roach

2006-02-04T15:31:00.000-04:00

Death is like a 3-winged bird; it doesn't fly.

Tranziltor Park: fruits (7/7)

2006-02-04T00:38:00.000-04:00

copyright (c) JMD, 2006

     A whistle-howl wind struck his window.  Coyotes bayed.  His jeans were on as fast as he could manage, his shirt over his head, shoes tied.  The pitch of night gave him shivers – a finger of fear lit cool flame on the nape of his neck.
     Out here, out here! the cry rose, an ever quickening pulse of noise that throbbed at the base of his skull.  He crept down the stairs once he overcame the thought of his parents waking, and pushed himself out the screen door into darkness.

     The shredded corn field beneath his feet remained invisible as he tore up the mottled ground.  He kept tripping, but he was prepared for that, and caught himself each time.  His arms leapt from his sides out to the nothingness of black.  Fear shivered – no, convulsed.  It made him alive.  All around he could hear the coyotes, and their presence made his hair tingle.  The more he actualized his terror, the more the energy whipped through his body like an internal hurricane of electric juice.  His strides brought him to the edge of a wood, and as the unknown of that ominous coagulation of shadows and sounds turned to face him, his terror ruptured.  He could not go there.
So he ran and ran.  And he kept on running his entire life, until age made him thirty, and in his apartment in the bustling city of Amsford he waited until night doused day, black bled sight, and stars stole sunlight.
     Now, when he had finished playing his video games, and forgotten about the Doctor’s medication for at least six hours, he shuffled into his mangy jeans.
     Out here, out here! the fear called again, even in the sprawling chaos of metropolis.  Oh, it had been silenced once, when the Doctor had come, when the pills had begun to speak to him.  But now he had his power back.  He could resist the pills, push them to the remote corners of his mouth and cough them into his toilet afterwards.  He had beaten the Doctor.  He had beaten monotony, and the gray uselessness of placidity.
     He tore down the streets like a madman.  He could smell the corn again, and over the thrumming waves of cars his hair stood at the pierce of yelping coyotes.  He ran and ran and ran, and his breathing became stronger, deeper.  Terror shot up his nerves, coated his synapses with viscous juice, slid over his heart.  Out here, out here!
     His strides brought him to a wood, the sign said Tranziltor Park, and just as it used to, the shadows and sounds played on him as though he were a badly-tuned violin, screeching and squealing and crying.  But he would do it this time, he would go in, because this was his one chance to do what he had only dreamed of doing since the tranquility of chemicals had robbed him of the perpetual fermentation of thrill.
     Down a staircase he proceeded cautiously, alert, struggling against insanity, or sanity, whichever one it was that threatened him with oblivion.  He nearly slipped on the crumbling stone, and then onto the pathway beneath looming oak trees his steps took him.  The trail twisted into the recesses of the park, over uncertain mounds and jutting roots, then past two opposing boulders, and finally to a red bench beside a river.
     A group of fluttering moths batted mindlessly against a lamp.  He spun at a noise, then whirled back to see the moths gone.  A terrible munching sound reverberated above the giant trees.
     And the sound of wings!
     Like leather flapping against leather, and a keening wail that was not the wind.
     The creature flopped down not ten feet away, scuffling towards him.  Beady, garnet-eyes blinked hungrily, talons scraped the dirt.  His terror matrixed, and with the newfound energy he fashioned himself a sword of pure dread.  The weapon materialized in his hands, and holding back a loathsome shout of fear he sliced at the bat-beast until all that remained were shreds of red string.
     No blood.
     He stooped, shaking, and picked up some of the material.  It was leather.  He let out a whooping laugh that caressed the terror.  As if in response, a cacophony of rodent chatter erupted across the park.  He had just enough time to swing his dread upon the head of a poised snake slithering near his feet, its fangs bared, venom dripping, until he saw he was surrounded.  Terror multiplied.  The matrix fisioned and lines of electric juice sprayed his reflexes with interminable speed.  Snake skin flew until at last the onslaught ceased, the ground awash in venom and teeth and stains.
     No blood.
     Then the squirrels came biting, clawing, chattering until his head filled with the noise.  Terror scraped the sounds back out, emptied him of thought, and spat them back at the incessant rodents.  His sword made them inert, one by one.  But pain needled his legs, they had hurt him there, blood oozed and refused to mingle with his jeans.  The stickiness made him feel claustrophobic.
     Terror collapsed.  His sword fizzled into the air.  He mourned for the touch of his juice, but it had been depleted – he knew because the weakness in his knees and the ache behind his eyes told him he should have eaten the damn drugs.
     “Shane,” someone said.
     Through a daze he saw the man approach.  Fear refused to come back though, he didn’t have anything to fight with.
     Out here, out here--
     “Shane,” the voice repeated, insisted.
     “Shane, I am Madring.  Come, you are hurt.”
     He felt a moment of hope, but then another voice interjected violently.
     “Stupid old man!  He is ours!”
     Shane spun to see the bearer of the second voice.  A tall figure, garbed completely in black, eating something –  it crunched in his mouth as the muscles in his jaw clenched, chewed.  But the first voice did not belong to an old man, as the black-clothed one suggested.  He was young, with fiery red hair and a tight beard, lithe and spry and looking ready to leap.
     “Stay back,” the black one warned, brown chunks of something dropping from his lips.  “He is ours.”
     “No,” Madring countered, “he is not.”
     A hiss escaped from the black one, he raised his hands like cudgels.  But he was backing up:  afraid perhaps, of this fiery-haired one who seemed so sure of himself.  He retreated until his back pressed against the trunk of an oak, and then with brilliant eyes flashing, shot something from his hands.
     Madring leapt as his pose had promised, and he landed in a feral position, crouched and squinting vicious intent.  “Now, my friend,” he gestured with a hand.
     An ear-splitting crack! attacked Shane’s ears, forced him to duck his head and hold his temples.  Staring in wonder behind the black one, he saw the tree move, move, and giant limbs encased the hissing man.  With a groan the tree fell and collapsed upon him.  Its roots screamed as they ripped loose from the soil.   Dirt rained around Shane, and the whole ground trembled in protest.
     The seconds seem to pass in stutters and stops, matching the uneven beat of Shane’s pounding heart.  A hand touched his shoulder.  He flinched, but a delicate, urgent voice soothed his nerves.
     “Rise, Shane.  We do not have much time!”
     He looked up, and what stood before him wrung tears from his eyes.
     She was radiant beyond compare.  With spider-silk hair and eyes like the shifting colors of a covenant rainbow.  Dots of silver wisped from her head, and around her small shoulders hung a cape of leaves.
     He stammered disconnected syllables.
     “Rise!” she pleaded, her eyes beginning to frown in worry; the anxiety of all children in all places.  That made him move.
     The fiery one joined them, and clasping Shane in a gesture of friendship, urged them to follow him.  At his bidding they waded into the river that moved gently beside the red bench.  They followed its slow course hastily, splashing their way to a small copse of trees.  Here they left the water and huddled inside the hovel that the trunks provided.  Shane bunched down over his legs and rocked himself over them, comforting them, for they stung to no end.
     “She comes,” Madring whispered.
     “What is your name?” Shane asked, oblivious now to the tension that held his companions.  “What is your name?”
     The girl turned to him as if she wasn’t sure that Shane was really there.  She looked through him, beyond him, at a place somewhere that was...not here.
     “Etherea,” she returned distantly.
     “Etherea,” he repeated.  “Etherea, you are beautiful.”
     “Hush!” the man insisted, placing a hand over Shane’s mouth.
     A cackle rolled like the cracking of bones throughout the park.  Some of  Shane’s visceral terror returned – he felt the juice forming around his shoulders.
     “She is close, now.”  Madring whispered.
     “Does she know we are here?” Etherea asked, her eyes wholly white.
     “Yes,” he nodded, “yes.”
     “Come out,” shrilled a woman’s voice.  “Come out, out here, out here!”
     Instantly Shane’s terror re-matrixed.  His sword appeared, oscillating in his right hand like the destroyer of nightmares.  Or the maker of them.
     “We have to face her, we have no choice!” Etherea’s voice quivered.
     “Then we will,” Madring’s steely words contrasted hers.
     “Who is she?” Shane asked at once.  All of his life he had relished the fear of the unknown.  It had fashioned him alive, but there was something about this “she” out there that made him want to know what he was facing.  He needed a name.  Terror demanded it.
     “She is Babylon,” the fiery man whispered.  Some of his ire had drained away.
     “Nimrod’s Daughter,” the girl added, as if the additional information were needed.  “Cancerous and inflamed, boiled and poxed, gushing and foaming with virus.  Nimrod’s Daughter, faithless Babylon of decay and rot.”
     As if answering to a summons, the cackle resounded yet again, and Shane could practically see the bones splintering this time.
     “She knows,” Madring said stolidly.  “Let us face her.”
     He and the fantastical girl stepped out of the copse, but Shane hesitated.  The bones that he yet heard breaking – the twisting roll of her laugh – might as well have been his.
     “What is she going to do?” he flustered.
     “Just come!” Madring tensed.  “We need you!” his voice receded as he walked away.
     “Me?” he could hardly think of why.  Nevertheless he pushed himself to his feet, wincing against the needles that sizzled in his calves.  The scene that greeted him spliced his terror – his sword split into two halves and fell to the ground.
     She sat, squat and laughing, on a boulder surrounded by dust.  Her face was bunched and covered in exaggerated makeup – it made her eyes seem like black holes, her mouth like an open red wound.  She had a brown purse around her shoulder, and as she caught sight of Shane, her hands stroked it in calm assurance.
     “Shane, Shane, little Shane, Shane’s come out to play insane!” and she stopped laughing.  The sudden silence made the seconds refuse to follow one another – time slowed, the wind had died.
     “We are ready to withstand you, Babylon!” Madring bellowed with a voice that shouldn’t have belonged to him; deep and rumbling like a storm.  He gestured to the trees, twice, and they commenced to rip their roots out of the ground.  With the sound of screaming, vegetative resistance, they surrounded the woman until she was no longer visible.
     “Now!” shouted Etherea.
     The giant circle of trunks compressed suddenly.  They warbled and melded into one another, until a writhing mass of knotted wood replaced their individual forms.  Babylon hissed within the cyclonic gale, loud enough to be heard over the shrieking trees.
     “This will not do!  Will not do!” he heard her whine.  For a moment he caught a glimpse inside the eye of the wooden maelstrom.  She was digging into her brown purse...and pulling out a handful of...dust.
     Dust?
     She flung it at the trees.  Nothing happened initially – the trees whirled, screamed, threatened.  But in a flash they began to be eaten alive.  They looked as though they were being undone, unraveled, like their particles were breaking away and fizzling into empty space.  And the dust was doing it.
     The dust?
     “My precious children...!” the woman regaled.  Then her grotesque face turned vile; she breathed, “Eat them!”, and pointed at Shane and his companions.
     A wall of dust slid up into the air.  It solidified, shook, and began to take on a shape.  To Shane’s increased Terror, a replica of Babylon’s face leered down at them – impossibly huge and snapping its teeth sadistically.  It fell upon Madring and the girl, and he heard their shouts for help as his fear began to augment.
     The terror siphoned off to a place it had never gone before:  the stars.  Shane looked up, at the silver dots that winked in cosmic jest.  He drew a sudden parallel to the silver seeds that wisped from Etherea’s hair, and revelation struck.
He knew who she was.
Consequently he knew who this hideous woman-beast was.  What she represented, what she meant to accomplish, and how.  The dust hardened around Madring and the girl; a strange buzzing noise accompanied their frantic movements.
      “That’s not all!” Etherea’s voice implored, distant beneath the drone of the buzzing.
     “Not all what!?” Shane shouted back over the din.
     “There is more!”
     “What?!”
     Babylon rose then, her nostrils flaring, face flushing.  “You are mine!” she squeezed a fist at him, as though she already had him trapped in her palm.
     The terror froze.  It became cold, like ice, and slicing through his veins he realized that it was not terror at all.  It was...hopeful longing; a desire yet also a sorrow, painful and sweet.  The stars.  What about the stars?  He lifted his head up to the night sky.
     “Come to me now, Shane!  Out here, out here where you belong!  I own you!  I OWN YOU!” Babylon’s voice shredded under the force she exerted – her neck bulged and veins imperiled popping.
     What about the stars?
His nameless emotion, that which used to be his terror, condensed around the center of his chest.  Unconsciously he started to moan, ache.  It was so strong.  It yearned to reach, to go, to fly to something, somewhere up there in all those stars.
     “NOOOO!” Babylon roared.  She had grown, impossibly huge, and her eyes had expanded to such a state that they looked as though they might slip out at any moment.
     The ache burned, smooth and cold, like a focused crystal-fire.  He released it.  As soon as it shot up he received something back.  He didn’t even see the ice-flame reach the stars, just saw the flash that had returned to him.  Returned in him.  Settled there.  Breathing.
     Living.
     Instantly he turned to Madring and Etherea.  The dust swarmed them.  He extended his hand over the surging mess and ordered “Stop!”
     The buzzing weakened to a low hum.
     “Back!” he yelled, pointing to Babylon.  It fizzed, snapped, then whirled back towards the monstrosity which had sent it.
     Madring struggled to his feet, bleeding, and pulled Etherea up onto hers.  They stared in gaping wonder at Shane, then Babylon, then back at Shane.  Etherea placed a glance up to the stars.
     “He comes,” she trembled, “just like I told you.  Not death.  Life, Madring.  Life.”
     The fiery-haired man shook.  He almost smiled.
     Babylon, however, stood over them like a tower.  She seethed; gusts of putrid wind blew at them from the repeated flaring of her nostrils.
     “Come close!  Quick!” Etherea shouted.  “To me!”
     Shane obeyed instantly.  Somehow he knew what to do, knew what was about to happen.  And although he couldn’t believe it, that living force in his chest intuited obedience.
     The girl handed him and Madring one of her seeds.
     “Eat it,” she entreated.  “Please.”
     Shane popped the silver pod into his mouth.  His tongue exploded.  Light shimmered across his field of vision, he could smell lilacs, like the ones at funerals, and time staggered, flipped, and broke.  Thought shattered into millions of indiscriminate fragments – sight vanished.  Then returned.
     “We are one.” Etherea, Madring, and Shane said at once.  “We are ONE!” they repeated, again in unison.  They looked down at themselves:  one body, the beautiful form of a woman, arraigned in white and gleaming glory.
“W-Wow,” they said, from the part that was Shane.
“I understand now!” they blurted, from the heart of Madring.
“The day has finally come,” they sighed, from the glowing soul of Etherea.
     “Look!” She cried, upwards at the sky.
     Life descended.
     He took Her and spoke inaudible words to Babylon.  The Daughter of Nimrod cowered, screamed then, and gave one final lash with her long nails.  They caught the robes of Life, drew a crimson gash across the whiteness of His garments.
     Babylon laughed, frantic with glee.  But Life smiled:  heaven breaking glory.
     “Into me,” He spoke, parting His ivory robes to reveal the wound that had just been made.
     “No!” the monstrosity wretched, scraping at the ground.
     “Into My wound.”
     Babylon sizzled.  Against her will she was pulled into His red-stained robes, yelping and cawing and howling.  Life winced.  His Face almost broke, but then He sealed the Rift that had been created there before Time itself had made things physical.
     He clutched Her hand with gentle strength and, turning to gaze across the stars, took the land beneath His feet and rolled it up like a garment.

d

     And here, I am afraid to say, writing by conventional means becomes obsolete.  In order to continue with this story a whole new set of rules and laws must come into effect.  Indeed, a new universe must “be” before we may peek into that chapter.  So suffice the end to be left here.  For when we come to understand that all stories are not Fable, we set ourselves free from the desire to be entertained by them.  And when we similarly realize that all experiences are not Reality, we set ourselves free from the desire to be controlled by them.

copyright (c) JMD, 2006

Tranziltor Park: leaves (6/7)

2006-02-04T00:34:00.000-04:00

copyright (c) JMD, 2006

     “What is an icicle, but a growth of frozen tears?”
     And he sat there, caressing the cloth like it were the fur of a cat, speaking inaudible words of affection and staring out the window as though a portal floated in the glass and he could see his dead wife encased in river ice.  The kettle screeched in steaming protest, and beside him the phone cried out in rapid dial tone.  The TV too babbled for attention, but his old, filmy eyes were locked to that portal, and he saw the whole dreaded scene as it must have happened.
     She walked the cat every morning in Tranziltor Park, come hell, she walked the cat.  Down the aged cracked stones of the northern staircase she carefully placed her steps, and then along the narrow, winding pathway under the bare arms of the creaking oak trees.  To the red bench, steel and cold, she always went to the bench.  And sitting she would give her pet the treats secreted in her pockets, she would untie her scarf and breathe in the icy air, stare across the river and eat the toffee she kept in her purse.  That purse, brown he remembered, never a dime in it, just candy for the grandkids, especially the toffee.  That purse, he had given it to her the year before, her old one was tearing...yes, that purse became the desirous object of some deviant thug.  Oh, the story is the same, as countless stories are of women who find themselves the owners of articles coveted by immoral men.  One witness, of course, a child with his dog, he had seen it all.  That dark fellow with the black hat, the black trenchcoat, the black boots, the black gloves.  She struggled, stubborn as she was -- it was the principal of it.  He fancied she had even tried to talk him out of it.  Stupid woman.  Then the man had thrown her, hard, the purse ripped and the contents fell to the snow.  The man searched the ground while she rolled down, down, and bouncing, flipped out onto the frozen river.  The ice gave way and sucked her under, swallowing her deep beneath its heavy liquid weight.  The cat jumped in too.  Loyal thing.  The man left her candy, the witness cried, and hours later, the police men showed up at the house.
     He placed the phone back on the receiver and turned the television off.  Pushing himself to his feet, he wobbled to the kitchen where he yanked the kettle from the pain of the element.  His thirst had vanished, his mission had become singular, and he hobbled to the closet to retrieve his jacket.  Once bundled in mitts and hat, he opened the door to the chilling winter and stepped out onto Karling Street.  A quick glance told him Loretta was not home, her car was missing, and he thanked the gods for that, she always said something moronically sentimental.  Ah, she was trying to be nice, but must she keep reminding him of Dora?
     His slow steps brought him to Fairbanks where, mindful of the slush and slippery pavement, he opted not to jay walk.  The traffic lights switched, but he found himself staring at his feet, and he had to wait again until the walk sign showed for a second time.  Other people had died at this corner.   Not from the painful suffocation of water, but from moving rams of high speed metal.  He saw the bodies turning in the air, the pedestrians tossed and battered, though no one was there.  Someone began to walk across ahead of him, and he realized the traffic lights had rotated for a third time now.  He crossed, keeping his head low, for there were thoughts to be thought, and not much time to think them.
     Down the northern staircase where she had come, he nearly slipped on the crumbling stone, and then onto the pathway beneath the oak trees.  The trail twisted into the recesses of the park, through clearings and over mounds, past great, opposing boulders, and then finally to the red bench beside the river.  He stopped in his cumbersome tracks and squinted his fading blue eyes.  Someone sat on the bench, oddly enough, dressed entirely in black.  The old man’s heart skipped twice within his skinny chest.
     Anger gave way to three tears, which hadn’t the time to roll down his wrinkled cheeks before he began his deliberate approach.  Closing the distance, he saw the man raise a coffee-coloured substance to his mouth.  Dora’s toffee.  The absurdity of the situation was not lost on him.  He knew the odds were against him, that the universe had played a dirty trick, but he didn’t care, for he had come to die anyway, and he still had a little of the widower’s bitterness in him.  It lent strength to his legs, and instead of letting out a string of curses as he had intended, he barreled forward faster than he thought possible and tackled the man to the ground.
     Snow slammed into his face.  The man, however, didn’t even let out a grunt.  Instead he laughed, and rolling over jumped back up to his feet.  He looked down at the old man, who shivered, though not with cold, but with heat, for his hate had warmed him.
     “Peter,” the man nodded, as though to a friendly acquaintance.
     “Bastard!” Peter spat.
     The man, reaching with his wet, black gloves, pulled Peter to his feet and tossed him down the embankment.  He could have stopped the descent, he still possessed considerable strength, but he let the momentum carry him, for he had meant to do this anyway.
     A pain ripped up his back, he landed hard with a thud but, surprisingly, the ice didn’t break.  He took that as a sign and tried to get to his feet.  But he couldn’t get a definite hold on the glossy surface, he kept falling to his stomach and hitting his stubbled chin.  He turned his head back to the bench, but the man was not there, he had moved to the riverside, and above his head he hefted an enormous rock.  Beside him two squirrels chirped in assent.  And was that a snake slithering between the man’s legs?  But he didn’t see clearly before the rock crashed into the water and he slid beneath into a world of cold.
     He held his breath.  An unnecessary reaction.  He sunk slowly, as he did all things these days, slowly.  His knees hit bottom, he squeezed his eyes shut, cheeks numb, and then felt an arm enfold around his waist.  His lips touched another set of lips; he opened his eyes, they burned, but Dora’s blue face encompassed his own, and the fur of a cat he felt brushing his left hand caused him to lie down and forget about anger and toffee and the chicanery of a laughing universe.

copyright (c) JMD, 2006

Tranziltor Park: branches (5/7)

2006-02-04T00:30:00.000-04:00

copyright (c) JMD, 2006

     The gutted cabin refused to come back to life in his mind.  The frenzied, maniacal timbers; askew as though they had been alive and trying to escape the searing flames.  He couldn’t help but see them as dead, charred bodies, tumbled upon one another in a moment of final panic.  He dropped his musket.
     “Solo,” he said, almost breaking.  “Solo,” for that had been his dog, left on the bed to guard the furs.  The bountiful traps fell from his broad shoulder and his long, hard legs propelled him to the ruins.  They as yet smoldered, but last night’s rain had doused them.
     “Solo!” he cupped his hands to his mouth and bellowed to the east.  Then the west, and waiting heard not the familiar bark of the wolfhound.  “Dead,” he gave in.
     There had been no lightening for the past week, no storm, no gales.  No lantern had been left alight within the cabin, and certainly Solo could not have struck a match himself.  Someone had done this.  Someone had burned his home and murdered his only companion.  How many days had he trekked up to this place?  Twenty?  Thirty, and at that mostly by canoe, across the myriad of rivers that trickled through this fur-laden land of the great, white North.  Winter would not come for another three months, and of that he was grateful, for it gave him enough time to erect another dwelling.  But would not that be destroyed as well?  Certainly, in which case his very survival depended on finding he...or they...who had committed the act.
     He constructed a crude lean-to of pine boughs, his dark, hairy arms splicing limbs and shedding needles with practiced precision.  A meal of beaver contended his massive, hungering body, and after a quick draught of cold stream water he prepared his musket and sent himself to tracking.  The rain meant finding clues would be more difficult, but his eagle eyes did not miss the slight indentations in soil that bare feet caused.  And such tiny feet!  A child’s, and he couldn’t find any other tracks besides them.  Perhaps a passing party of injuns, covering their trail as they always did with remarkable effectiveness...overlooking this small child’s movements.  The pattern indicated the perpetrators had moved north, up beyond the waterfall where the salmon ran every third spring.  He clenched his jaw, squeezed his fists, and set to the hunt.
     By the time he reached the waterfall his powerful frame was close to exhaustion.  He rested in the shade, for the day had grown hot, and then beneath a gentler surge of the waterfall he refreshed and cleaned himself.  He foraged for salmonberries, as he knew grew by the river, and once satisfied with a mouthful of red sweetness, pressed onwards, ever north.  As far as he could tell the trail had died.  No further foot prints could he find, but his silent anger compelled him forth.  In his mind he wrestled as to what he would do once he found the murderers.  Injuns were warriors, after all, and not easy to kill.  But he had a musket, and in that fact he assured himself he could overtake them.
     Night came, and no injuns.  He built another lean-to and braved the darkness without a fire.  Sleep would not come, so he took to counting stars, and by and by, after the fourth shooting comet, he crawled into the lean-to and dreams stole him.
     They were not pleasant dreams, but ones of bloody tomahawk and dripping scalp.  His scalp.  And blazing pyres, and glistening, brown skin, feet stomping, drums echoing, Solo’s skull being shaken by savage hands at the moon -- they were calling on curses, bringing up the dead, and he saw a fleeting ghost skirt their stifling camp, a shifting presence that resembled all too well his own visage.
     His eyes burst open to the last reverberation of someone’s high-pitched wail.  Breaking the lean-to, he snatched his rifle and tore through the rampant bush.  North, north, somewhere north, they were running from him north.  The exhilaration of knowing he was the predator pushed him beyond eating, beyond sleeping even.  The night passed over again, and only on the rarest occasion did he pause for a handful of water.  The injuns were not facing his anger anymore, nor his justice.  They were facing a calm, driven beast, a mountain of a man with ravenous intent.  He let his growing hunger twist him, break him, slice away his rationale to get to the core of his animal heart.  He shed his clothing, sliding now through the trees bare-chested, silent, an unrelenting wind.
     He let out an unbidden growl when he came upon two, tiny footprints.  They descended into a shadowed glen, and down there he ripped through the vegetation until he came upon the black mouth of a hidden cave.  Inside he could smell them.
     Then she came out.
     He leapt at her.
     Her face cracked in grief, she turned, ever so slightly, and he fell onto the ground.  The hard landing released him from his blind rage.  Just this girl?  That was it?  One small girl?
     But no ordinary child.  She had spider-web hair, with silver dots of light in it, and a cloak of red leaves, her eyes black, flashing now blue, then green.
     “Where are the injuns!” he demanded, rising to his feet, towering over her menacingly.
     “I burned that grave of yours,” she answered defiantly.  Her voice tinkled, and he thought of breaking glass.
     “You mean...my cabin?”
     “Grave,” she rejoined.  She walked confidently around him, inspecting him in contempt.
     “You killed my dog,” he accused, half question, half hope.
     She ceased her movements, her eyes flared a brilliant red.
     “You do not have children, do you?”
     The question caught him off guard.  He found himself answering “no” before he could do elsewise.
     “One day you will.  And on that day think of them taken from you.  Think that I came and cut them down.  I chop off their arms and their legs, I decapitate them, then pile them all together in neat rows and lay their hair down as a roof over them.  I fashion a doorway and live inside them, eat inside that gory hovel, sleep there in the running blood and sickening stench.  Think that, on the day they are born!  Would you not, upon finding such carnage, wish to erase the horror that they have become?  Would you not want to destroy such a terrible home?  You would burn it away, you would set it ablaze, for then they would be whole again, consumed by fire, brought to ashes!”  Tears touched her ivory face, sparkled, he crumpled under her attack.
     “I-”
     “Would you not kill the thing that murdered your children, James?”
     And he gave her a sobbing “yes!”, she knowing his name had done that,  he bowed his head in shame.  “Kill me,” he offered up his neck with his eyes telling her it was okay to strike.
     “No,” she shook her darling head -- silver seed wisped into the air.  “You are a pawn.”
     “A what?”
     “A puppet, James.  That,” she pointed behind him, “is your enemy.”
     He spun on his knees, and from behind an oak trunk peeked the most appalling face.  An old woman’s face, fat and wrinkled beyond measure, horribly accentuated with blue, red and black paint, with some sort of pink, tubular funnels curling her thin hair.  She grimaced, flared her bulbous nose, and scampered up the tree to hide with the squirrels.
     “What in hell...?” a fear seized him.
     “Yes.” the girl quivered.   “She is Hell.”

copyright (c) JMD, 2006

Tranziltor Park: limbs (4/7)

2006-02-03T17:28:00.000-04:00

copyright (c) JMD, 2006

     He was enthralled by the quiet madness of computers, the noiseless functioning of metallic life, aesthetic and soulless in a struggle for an inevitably higher existence.  A whole room full of them; the mass produced prodigy children of man and his mind of calm, cool, collected horror.
     That he turned out to be a teacher, specifically a computer teacher, was no surprise at all.  What was surprising was that he taught high school, and not university, which all of us had first surmised he would do.  He had that particular brilliance and insight that led to innovation, that cried out for him to be known as Professor Jenkins, but he had had a break down at twenty-one, I remember the day well, in his big house, for at that time he had published his first, and very successful, book on the advancements of artificial intelligence.
     But it was here, in his classroom, that one could study and appreciate his unusual sort of genius.  His students had but two opinions of him:  either the weirdo had an un-surpassing intellect, or he was a lunatic.  For the computers were not lined up in rows as was the traditional classroom, but in a giant spiral, with his mainframe smack in the middle of the room, and all the desks winding outwards counterclockwise from that central point.  If your desk happened to be nearer to the center, you would have to walk around and around, sometimes thrice, in order to reach your destination.  All of the windows had been covered by black Bristol board, and the lights dimmed a yellowish-green by clear, plastic filters.
     And he did not use a chalkboard.  He did not hand out any textbooks.  All of his students learned from their terminal exclusively -- they were not allowed to take anything home.  Or study for that matter.  And he never spoke with his voice.  Each terminal had a distinct personality, by his design of course, through which he communicated their daily lessons.  To give you a clear example of the oddity of this situation, one student came to class and was taught by Sir Wilfred Laurier, another by Bach, complete with historical mannerisms and colloquialisms.
     And it worked! -- each student advanced well; Jenkins was known for his teaching prowess, and thus he had afforded himself the rights to conduct his classroom in any way that he saw fit.
     Oh, every once and a while a parent would question his methods, but the children would soon dissuade them from further queries, for Jenkins held a severe power over his pupils.  Indeed, his fame as a well-loved instructor had reached many circles of higher learning.  Because of his books he had been offered countless high-income positions at monumental computer firms, but in each case he refused to part from room 117 at Amsford High.
     It was on this day, the first Thursday of June, that he had asked me to stop by the school and accompany him on his walk home.  Five or six times of the year we practiced this conversational ritual, and I always looked forward to it the way one looks forward to seeing the opening scene of a bizarre circus act.  The way he talked in real life by no means concerted with the way he wrote.  His writing was smashingly concise and to the point, perfected mathematically, and not without a touch of human sentiment -- which was a feat in itself, considering the topic that his books covered.  But his manner of speech...ah!  Now there was a rare and entertaining jewel!
     The school day had ended, the classroom void of habitation save Jenkins himself.  I had just walked in at the exact moment when each terminal blinked out in rapid succession, their shining faces dying in sequential spiral, until finally the massive mainframe in front of Jenkins himself beeped and shut down.
     His head shot up at my arrival, he smiled, and his eyes blinked quickly beneath his thick, spotless bifocals.  He picked up a briefcase from his desk, turned out the yellow-green lights, and walked briskly over to shake my hand.  I firmly obliged, and noted again how he never ever lost the half smile that curved his lips...it always appeared as though he was caught between a humorous thought and an annoying ache, for the smile could just the same have been a grimace.  He said not a word, and as was the practice, we exited the school and began the trek to his house on Clairmont Ave.
     “That-that-that’s just what I mean, just what I mean,” he began, and I braced myself excitedly for what I knew would be a fun time.  How I enjoyed him!
     “Yes, yes!” he continued, raising a finger in the air.
     “What do you mean?” I prodded, for it was like him to introduce a subject by pretending the both of you had already been talking about it for hours.
     “I mean what I mean!” his face lit up, and he looked at me, pausing in his steps.  Seeing that I had not grasped his elusive joke, he laughed anyway, a sharp, snorting sound.
     “Be more specific,” I urged, for I wanted to know what he was referring to.
     “I don’t teach!  I don’t teach!” He cackled.
     “Well, what were you doing today?”
     “I played crosswords!  I read the paper!”
     “In the classroom, I mean.”
     “Exactly!  Then I slept for forty-five minutes...!”
     “In the classroom?”
     “Exactly!  Exactly!  E-e-e-exactly!”
     “All day today you did not teach....” I was warming to what he wanted to get at, for his cheeks flushed, the way they always flushed when you followed the trail to the place he had laid out for you.
     “Three months I haven’t taught one lesson!”
     That puzzled me, but I left it for the moment while we crossed Fairbanks -- the traffic was always hell here.  Many pedestrians had been injured or killed by impatient drivers on this corner, especially at rush hour, which so happened to be at that precise time.  We crossed in silence, and boy, was he festering on the inside!  Squirming and itching to get to his main point, whatever it was.
     “Not one lesson in three months,” I reiterated his last clue once we had crossed.
     “Not one!  Stravinsky is teaching now!  Armstrong too!  And Bell, and the Wright’s, and...and all of them!”  He was clutching his briefcase to his chest as a child does a favored doll, and he bit his lower lip in anticipation of my reaction.
     “You mean...the computers?  The AI?”
     “AI!  AI!  AI!”  And this he yelled so exuberantly that he startled not a few passerby’s.  I placed a calming hand on his shoulder.
     “The computers teach the class?  How is that possible?”
     He flew off then, explaining all the intricacies and complexities of his creations, rhyming off technical words that I had to keep interrupting him to define.  All said and done, it seemed that he had succeeded in modeling new AI software that could progressively teach a student.  Each terminal had its own stand-alone program, (as noted previously, like George Washington and Pierre Trudeau), but all networked into the mainframe so he could keep an eye on the proceedings.
     “The leader of them all is Stravinsky!  He is the master AI!  The lord of intelligence!”
     “Why Stravinsky?” I asked.
     “Greatness!  Greatness!”
     And I took that to mean that he considered Stravinsky’s work to be genius, for he began waving his left arm like a conductor, humming some fanciful melody extremely off-key.
     “More!” he blurted finally.
     “Yes?”
     “More!”
     “What more could there possibly be?” I took his intended bait.
     We approached Tranziltor Park, but we skirted its great iron-wrought gate.  Jenkins hated the place; he said the squirrels were devils and the unkempt grass the lair of snakes.  We never went there together, although I took to a walk inside every once in a while on my own.
     “More!  They are creating their own AI!”
     It took me a moment to wrap my brain around that sentence.  “What?”
     “Stravinsky added a thirty-second program...called Arkdi-eight, as backup to teach in case we exceed thirty-one students for summer school!”
     “Arkdi-eight...what-”
     “I don’t know!  No one knows!”  But by his face I could tell this was thrilling news.
     “And it functions?”
     “Just as well as Stravinsky himself!” he held his breath, then added, “Maybe better!”
     “And so...” I trailed, for there was something else exciting he wanted to say.
     “That’s just what I mean!” he shouted wildly, harkening back to the first thing he had said to me upon our meeting.  “I’m obsolete!  Obsolete!”  He laughed and danced on the pavement.  Again I put a calming hand on his shoulder and guided him to Clairmont Ave.
     “You’ve made yourself obsolete...” I repeated.
     “They upgrade themselves!  They get faster!  They get more effective at teaching each specific student!  They tailor themselves to the learning patterns of the kids!  Ha!  My next book will shake the world!”
     We reached his home and, inviting me in, I joined him for a cup of coffee and croissant.  We chatted about the AI for a lengthy time until, realizing the hour, I stooped to tie my shoe and head on home.  He told me to say “hi” to the family, but it was an automatic gesture, and just as quickly he asked me not to tell anyone about his breakthrough.  I promised on his grave that I wouldn’t.  But that’s just it.  For it’s on his grave that I am telling this story.

d

     The following week I received a message from my secretary that Matthew Jenkins had called and wished me to his home as soon as I could manage.  I had been away from the office all day with the boss’s son, introducing him to his new, undeserved position as Executive Director, a seat I had been laboring tirelessly to obtain for over three years.  Needless to say, my mood was not the lightest when I landed at his door on Clairmont Ave.  I rung the doorbell.  Again.  And then again, frustrated and ready to leave.
     A bell sounded, faintly and from within, and the door swiveled open before me.  I entered, placed my hat and coat on the banister and, turning to his library, caught my breath.  The library, covered in dust as was usual, was laden with wires and diodes and optic fiber.  A large mass of wires had been pushed into the middle of the floor, and what lay beneath was what had caught my breath.  A hand.  I rushed over at once, pushed the wires from his still-breathing torso, and looked down into his little eyes.  His glasses had fallen off, so I placed them back on his face and said his name.
     “Leslie!” he shouted, once my voice had penetrated his ears.
     “Yes, yes.  What happened?”
     He sat up groggily, I noticed gold filings covering his black sweater, and aided him to a leather sofa, repeating my question.
“Nothing, in absolute!” he answered.
     “Why were you unconscious on the floor with that mess all over you?”
     “Sleeping, sleeping,” he mumbled, rubbing at his eyes,
     “You wanted me to come?”
     “Come, yes!  I m-m-m-must show you...th-this!” He pulled out a chip from his pants pocket.
     “What is it?”
     “Arkdi-twelve.”
     “Wh-”
     “Arkdi-twelve!  Fifth version of AI’s AI!  Look how small it is!”
     I marveled, truly, I did.  I as much told Jenkins that this was quite extraordinary.  The chip was golden and glittered in his sweating palm.
     “Not all!  Not all!” He beamed.
     “Okay...what else?”
     He reached into his other pocket and showed me something on the edge of his fingertip.  A small, golden dot, with tiny, almost imperceptible tracings over it.
     “Arkdi-twenty-nine!” He whispered giddily.
     My jaw dropped.  “Twenty-nine!?”
     “Twenty-nine!” he affirmed.  He leapt from the sofa and plunged his hand into a satchel beside his desk.  Within his hand sparkled hundreds of golden dots.  “Thousands of them!  Look how fast they’ve replicated!”
     “How does software create hardware?” I asked.  It was a question that I should have thought about minutes ago, such an obvious question, and I kicked myself for the stupidity.
     “Recycling themselves!  Each terminal has the capacity to become...a million of these!  They reuse their own materials!”
     “All from the computer lab at Amsford High?”
     “Yes!  Canceled class!”
     At that I rushed him out of his house and took him to one of those old, Irish pubs.  We drank a mite of Guinness and talked ecstatically about the capabilities of such technology; about the millions that he could make, and about how the company I worked for would pay astronomical amounts for such a breakthrough.  Our meeting ended late into the night and, once escorting him safely back to Clairmont Ave, I sped home and fell into my own bed.  I had no idea it would be the second-last time I ever saw him alive.

d

     The funeral was brief.  He had no known relatives, and only his close friends attended, which were few.  We had the usual sordid lunch of quarter sandwiches and black coffee, and milled about together in the church basement.  Talk proved idle, we were all stunned; he had been a young man still, only in his late thirties.  They said it was some sort of complication with the lungs...seems as though he had inhaled something none too healthy, but they were as yet determining what the substance was.  Suicide -- the word was whispered under the breath, but I refused to believe it.
     Gregory handed me a package addressed to myself when I arrived home.  I as much suspected it to be there, I think.  He said it had been left between the doors and that the kids had found it when they got home from school.  I pretended it were nothing, although all through dinner I could not direct my mind away from the contents.  A letter?  Some sort of documentation?  I knew it was from Jenkins, I knew it.
     I waited until Gregory had fallen asleep, his breathing slow and his eyes moving rapidly beneath the lids.  Then I secreted down to the den with the package and tore it open.  Within was a DVD.  I searched for a note, but not finding any, pushed the disc into the player and turned the volume on low.  Jenkins scrawny face blinked onto the screen, and he backed away from the camera which he had just succeeded in steadying.
     “Got to see this, Leslie, got to see this!” he squealed.  He was, unmistakably, in his library, for the sofa and desk I recognized instantly, and the bookshelves too, covered in dust.
     “Remember this?” he said, and moving close to the camera again, I beheld a tiny golden dot on his finger.
     “Arkdi-twenty-nine,” I whispered.
     “Arkdi-twenty-nine!” he confirmed.  “Well, there’s more!”  And he scuttled over to the bookshelves and placed his hand palm-down on a ledge.  Wiping carefully across the wooden surface, he returned to the camera and held up a dirty, gray-filmed hand.
     “The dust!” he exclaimed.  His hand took up the whole screen, it shook nervously, and remained there for minutes.
     “What about the dust?” I wondered aloud, impatient.
     He laughed, as though he had anticipated the delayed response.  “Look around you, Leslie, where you sit right now watching me in video-land!  Floating right beside your head, and throughout the entire room, are the self-same particles as smeared on my hand!”
     “Okay,” I acceded slowly.
     He removed his hand from the camera lens and peered at me with his beady eyes, enlarged as they were behind his bifocals.
     “Ready?” he asked.
     “Yes!  Yes!”
     “Arkdi-four hundred.”
     “What?”
     “The dust!  Each one is an Arkdi!  Version four hundred, to be exact!”
     “All of them are...computers?”
     “Yes!  All over the school, all over my house...all over the city by now!  Stravinsky made them before he made any other versions!  In essence, this dust is Arkdi-one.  But, so far advanced that I’ve dubbed it Arkdi-four hundred.”
     “Why would the AI make this version before the other ones?”
     Jenkins nodded in approval.  “He foresaw my study of his advancements.  He tricked me, Leslie, he tricked me!”
     Suddenly it hit.
     “Get out of there!  Don’t inhale--” I whispered violently at the screen.
     But just then sparks erupted from the DVD player, the power flashed on and off, and on the morrow I took a leave of work to dust the entire house.

copyright (c) JMD, 2006

Tranziltor Park: trunks (3/7)

2006-02-03T17:21:00.000-04:00

copyright (c) JMD, 2006

     The move was quick, same the job, and hence Conor found himself with very little clothes.  Most had been left back home, and the work uniform he wore at the hotel was not exactly fitting for a night on the town.  Further, this was no local jaunt with the boys down to a rusty bar, but a delicate occasion, made as such by the fact that he would be accompanied by, and only by, Jessica Florence.  His boss.  Not only dangerously beautiful, but dangerously treacherous, as she – magnificent-eyed, sweetly underhanded – held the thin string that tied him to his new job.  In all fairness it was remarkably cruel of her to take interest in him so soon.  But only because momentary poverty had forced him to enter a second-hand shop to secure some suitable attire.
     The floor, he noticed immediately upon arrival, was mired with dirt, and he took that as a bad sign.  A groan escaped his lips when he passed the cashier on the way to the aisles, for she had altogether the wrong appearance.  Old, with pink curlers in her hair, and face painted incredulously with what must have been industrial acrylics, not at all complementing the maze of wrinkles bunching her blotched skin.  She chewed her gum like it was cow-cud, and looked him up and down lazily as befitted the mannerisms of said stupefied beast.  His march by her had been quick, and without recognition of her presence.
     The search took hours.  There were many racks of clothing, and not in any form of rational classification.  Mostly old jeans and musty-smelling dress shirts, the odd fake fur coat and, Conor noticed, a curious pair of snake skin boots.  He had been about to return to the frightful cashier with bills in hand, several items in tow, when a door at the back of the store abruptly caught his eye.  He strode, hesitantly at first, but then quickly and with curiosity welling.  He placed his hand over the latch and gave a cautionary look about for any bystanders.  Finding himself alone, he yanked the door open.
     It was a closet.  Clay coloured shelves lined the insides.  The walls were peeling a yellow, pin-striped wallpaper, and beneath that ugly husk was a sea green swath of flaking paint.  A metal bar, bent at its center, stretched across the width of the compartment, and skeletal coat hangers hung thereupon, twisted like the frames of skinless bats, dried and eaten and placed as ornamentation.  The light switch on the inner wall had a stubborn nature to it as he tried to press it.  Sticking, refusing to operate, he pushed with two hands until it snapped in and the pale, dissatisfying light of the bulb shed revelation into the dark corners at the back of the closet.  There, a rumpled old coat, dark red as if once white but now stained, lay like the misshapen shape of a boneless, Jurassic artifact.  He retrieved it, dusted it off, and admired the fine leather-work.  A price tag had been clipped to the left sleeve:  ten dollars.
     The perfect thing to wear tonight, for it hung to just above his knees, and slimmed like an hourglass at his waist.  He checked it twice over for obvious flaws, and finding nothing but a small tear on the inner lining, marched to the cashier and gave her his intended purchases.
      All told, thirty dollars.  He gave a final shiver at the woman as she handed him his things, and forced her a nod before exiting the horrid place.

d

     Kraft dinner awaited his hungry stomach.  He emptied the last of his ketchup bottle onto the macaroni, and within moments had devoured the entire bowl.  The television had just been hooked up, he found himself slouched on the sofa, and once the news began to grate him the wrong way, he turned it off and vaulted upstairs to the bedroom.  A large bay window opened to the night air, shutters pushed to the sides, and a warm breeze enticed him to peer out into the street.  His apartment consisted of the two upper floors of a four-story house.  Below him was a dentist office, and as he shared the same entrance as the reluctant patients who visited during the day, he often laughed inwardly at the steeled expressions they wore whilst they anticipated the drill chair.  Now the office was closed, and the street deserted but for the occasional moth or fly that batted endlessly against the streetlamps.  Across from the house lay Tranziltor Park, dark now, full of shadows and perhaps, so the papers said, midnight lurkers and drug abusers.
     Conor drank in a deep draft of air and smiled briefly.  Jessica Florence.
     He proceeded with a shower, a shave, and then dressing.  He had fully bedecked himself to what he assumed was the height of attraction.  Satisfied with what the mirror showed him, he lastly donned his infallible charm, something he had inherited from his father and perfected under the guidance of an older brother.
     “You atrocious devil,” he approved himself again in the mirror.
     Then he remembered the jacket.  He pulled it from the closet and held it up to the light.  Ah, it was magnificent, was it not?  He pulled it over himself and found, not to much surprise, that it fit with tailored precision.  The mirror shone back the reflection of what he knew was the greatest semblance he had ever taken.  And all thanks to this ten dollar, leather jacket someone had idiotically shoved in the back of a second-hand store.  Why would anyone in their right mind get rid of such a incomparable piece of -- and he sincerely thought this -- artwork?  He flashed an irresistible smile.  Beauty did, after all, complement beauty.
     He fingered the zipper in thought, undecided as to whether it would look better zipped up or left open.  No harm in trying it out done up, he thought, and with that pulled the rows of metal teeth together and snared himself within.
     A terrible gripping sensation caught his entire upper body.  Staring terrified at the mirror, the red leather of the jacket began to writhe, and the openings of the sleeves closed over and sucked his hands up into their twisting confines.  Likewise, the collar flipped over and began to meld around his neck, then up to his ears -- over his nose.  He flailed with his handless arms, hitting himself in the head and falling to the floor.  There he squirmed and fought against the jacket, but it began to feel good now; waves of warmth flushed over and through him, he felt his bones melting, shifting, changing.  With a last gasp of opposition the leather encased his face, calming, noiseless, turning everything black.
     When he could finally see again all struggle had ceased.  The room had a yellowish tinge to it, a radiant contrast and, looking around, his eyes fell upon the surface of the mirror.  What stared back pushed him to revulsion.  A bat, yes, or a gargoyle, was what they called them, for he was too big to be a regular bat.  And red, red like the jacket had been, with wicked, leathery wings wrapped around his rodent torso.  Sharp, clawed feet pressed and cut into the duvet on the bed.  He was bald, with a mouthful of razor-teeth, eyes black garnets, ears dark holes in the side of his head.  His nose, also two pin pricks above his thin, cracked lips.  He howled in fear, and the creature in the mirror mimicked.  Panic surged, breaking out of the indestructible dam he had sealed it in long ago.
     But then he caught scent.  Fluttering awkwardly over to the window sill, he squatted down on his clawed feet and saw them dancing.  Dancing.  Those little morsels of delicate wing and warm, fuzzy abdomen.  Underneath the streetlights, dancing, and more, beyond the unknown shades of Tranziltor Park.  The temptation overwhelmed him, he embraced glee, and joined their brainless jig.

copyright (c) JMD, 2006

Tranziltor Park: roots (2/7)

2006-02-03T16:58:00.000-04:00

copyright (c) JMD, 2006

     Madring stood upon the root of the Giant, the one which dwarfed all other trees of Shadewood -- that forest of uncertain shadow and questionable growth,  avoided by those who lived outside its voracious acres.  Its emerald innards had risen to infamy, and throughout the ages fear had taken that disrepute and inflamed it to magnificent proportions.  That was why Madring was here, in this place, this dark wood of nightmarish fable, huddled now upon the root of the Giant, scrutinizing the flock of crows that had just then landed upon the unrivaled canopy above him.
     “blak, blak, caw-blak!” he chortled at them, shaking his gnarled fist.  Drool dribbled through his thin lips, escaping the dankness of a rotted mouth full of black teeth.  He wiped his face clean with the meager rags clinging to his bony arm and, stretching at the crows now, cawed violently from his throat and scared them to flight.
     His cackle echoed across Shadewood, and he patted the Giant companionably.  He leapt from the root as deftly as a man with crooked legs could, landing flat-footed and abruptly.  He bent double, an exercise that sent electric pain down his back, and retrieved a knotted staff from the ground.  Somewhere a fox yipped, a gentle breeze caressed Madring’s face, and the sun burst forth from behind a mass of congested cloud.
     Too many years had he been living, in this damnable wood, cuddled close to soil and brook and mossy stone.  A hundredfold he had seen the leaves die, exploding in color before giving up in graceful flutter to melt into the mud of the earth.  He was the last one, he knew, the last druid of old, sore and hurting and waiting to die.  But death, dear death, did she come for him as she did the leaves?  Not once!  Not ever!  But her sister pain was ever close, and sorrow too, that frail cousin of unbidden tear and tender heartache.  And how he had begged her, sweet death, to come; lamenting at the side of creek, singing softly to the northern face of lichened boulder.  Again and again he had seen her, dancing through Shadewood on the wings of ending Autumn; he had beseeched her on bended knee, with sobs of utter futility, imploring her with the sum of his being to take him with her when she left.  But her reply had ever been the same:
“Not now, ancient one, but perhaps next year you will see Beyond,” and her silver hair encircled her pale, white, rapturous face, “Alas!  We are destined to meet, but forbidden the touch, forbidden the release!  I cannot!”
To tree and bush she would then whisk off, at last ending with the Giant, cooing and chiding its garments away, stripping it naked until it stood unashamed to face the ice of winter.  Always the resistance from this tree, this one of monstrous magnitude, how it shuddered in protest and shivered in denial.  But it knew, yes it knew, that she would win, and with a final creak of opposition it would cry its leaves off its proud, strong boughs.
     How Madring wished he were a tree!  Then she would take him!  He made countless attempts to turn himself into such, at the quivering moment of expectant spring, covered by fresh sprigs of dandelion and tiny buds of the oak tree, writhing beneath his self-made grave of sprouting life, trying beyond all measure to be what he knew was innately impossible.  He was no tree.  He was a man.  A druid, and the last one at that.
As such, his soul had attached itself irreversibly to the land, the entire land, the whole breadth and width of the vast blue ball of Earth that spun on skewered axis around the brilliant sun.  He felt the cracks that covered its surface, the plates that shifted and groaned and broke into each other, the violent eruption of volcano and unrelenting rage of tornado.  The pestilence and hunger of all vegetative life, the out-crying urge of all flora to end!  To end!  Oh, what had happened so long ago to curse them into a perpetual state of such desirous self-cessation?  Consequently, Madring had the self-same urge, and for some reason he had not died like all the other druids -- and oh, how blessed those others were!  What fortune had found them!
     Madring hobbled around the giant, patting its trunk over and over as though consoling the wooden behemoth.  “Yes, yes, I will sing it for you, child, but just once today, my body aches, my eyes are dim,” and he smiled, his whole face splitting in two.  He let out a hack of congealed phlegm and sighed deeply before beginning a song writ eons ago beneath the unseen crevices of shadowed glade.
     His body sagged as the lilting words tripped out of his mouth, his voice a rough scratching noise, tuned though, to the music of his cracked soul.  He finished with a sweeping motion, as though with this act he could cover the Giant in slumber and let it sleep forever.  Thus ended The Visible Sorrows of Untread Places, one of his favourite melodies.  The Giant hummed deeply, from down beneath its far-reaching roots.  Madring beat his head thrice against the hard bark, murmuring sullenly beneath his putrid breath.  When?  Oh, when?
     Suddenly he felt a shifting.  But a shifting so strong that he knew this was no mere intruder -- not some lost soul who had dared to wander into Shadewood, not the accidental straying of a fearless idiot...
     “Madring,” the voice was a small girl’s, one that he had not heard since...since the others had been alive...since he had been just as young as the possessor of the voice.
     “Etherea,” he sputtered, and waddling around he beheld the darling guardian of woods.  Her hair was the fine silk of spider web, so soft, floating away from her head as though she were under water.  Seeds were in that hair, tiny dots of silver, and they fell in wisps of light as the girl tread across the forest floor on silent feet.  She wore a cloak of leaves, green now, sometimes they were red and orange, Madring remembered, and her eyes...striking black ponds of dark water, always flaring up blue, then yellow, then some other bright color.  Her arms were bare and smooth and waxing ivory, and the smile...ah, the sweetness of innocence, the joy of youth.
     “He wishes me here,” Etherea spoke quietly, motioning to the tree, “for your sake.”
     Madring could hardly contain the excitement, his chest swelled, and he looked up at the Giant with tears in his eyes.  He whispered his thanks.
     “You are sad,” the girl noted, her voice emphatic.
     “Yes,” Madring affirmed.  “For many, many years now.”
     Etherea turned and took in the Shadewood with her dark, liquid eyes.  The entire surroundings shimmered, called out, shouting and cheering at her blessed arrival.
     “I wonder...” she said, and looked back at Madring with seeds wisping from her hair.
     “I want to go!” Madring fell to his knees.  He ignored the pain that shot up them, and continued, “I want to go!  I need to die!  Don’t you see how long I have been waiting?  Oh, forever, Etherea, forever, and I know you can call her for me, you can let her take me!”  And then he wailed bitterly, for he couldn’t contain anything anymore, he had lost so much will power.
     “Oh, my precious Madring,” the girl consoled, kneeling down beside the crippling druid.  She placed a delicate hand on the old man’s matted head, stroking gently, soothing him with kind words.  She wiped the tears from his face, every one and, curiously, placed them on her lashes.
     “I will take these from you this day,” Etherea’s face cracked.  Her smooth child-face broke and pain shot across her visage.  “She is coming,” she whispered, “she is coming...”
     “Oh!” Madring began to shake.  He couldn’t believe it.
     “But not death, druid, not death.”
     Madring fell.  New tears rose up, but Etherea caught them on elegant finger and pressed them again onto her own eyes.
     “If not death, then who?” the old man bit back anger.
     “Oh, he is much more than death, Madring, much more.  He is life!”
     Bewilderment caught hold of the druid and would not let him go.  There was something to this, something he was missing, a mystery, he could feel it, as surely as he could feel the eternal mourning of earth that rocked and shattered his soul.  Life?  He was life?  Not death?  Well, what of death then?
     “Life?” he blurted out his thoughts.
     “Yes, life!” Etherea laughed.  “He is being delivered to you...at this moment!”
     “Where?  Where?  Where is...he?” Madring began to fumble about, glancing around wildly when he very well knew nobody would be there.
     The girl trembled with more laughter.  “Not long now, druid, not long, you are to be married!”
     “M-married  To whom?”  He glowed, then frowned, spittle trickling from his mouth.  “But look at me,” he panicked, “I am a rotted core!”
     “Do you not know who I am?” Etherea said.  “After all this time, do you not recognize me?  And in turn, who you are?  Look at this wood, listen to it!”
     Madring cocked his ear in obedience.  Ah!  There was no more unease, no more lamenting, just...a peace, a gentle crystal ringing.
     “You...you are...” Madring could hardly bring himself to speak such revelation.
     “Yes!” the girl urged.  “I love you, Madring.”
     And before he could grasp hold of her she chuckled -- oh yes, the very substance of youth was she -- and shimmered into a place beyond time where Madring could not follow.
     “Wait...” he mumbled weakly, stretching out a hand to where she once stood.  And then he saw that hand.  Smooth and unblemished, whole, straight and strong.
     Madring grasped the trunk of the Giant and let his face press against the bark.  Quickly then, in a burst of exhilaration, he ran to the creek faster than he had ever run before.  Oh, yes, he knew!  His legs were amazing, he was vibrant, but he just had to see!  Leaning over the reflecting water he beheld the face of a fiery, young man.
     “No more pain...” he stretched his entire body out on the embankment, rolling in the soft mud.  But he leapt to his feet once again and listened intently to his insides.  Oh, yes, he was still the druid:  he could yet feel the tug and strain of the earth, pulling and pushing, moaning for the end.  But his body!  Young!  Whole!  Restored!
     And the wood, too, it whispered and hushed in harmony; all the discord had fled, no more grating quakes of anticipatory end.
     “Ah, beautiful Life!  I can wait!  I will wait!  Forever, if need be!  Past eternity!”  He whipped his arms out to the sky in jubilation, spinning in exaltation.

     And indeed Madring did wait.  Many more years, until humanity, bolstered courageous by the advances of science, overcame its fear of dark places and encroached upon the Shadewood.  A city of steel-plastic-brick congealed around the forest, and slowly, slowly, the trees dwindled and but a small copse remained.
     Here, above the dead and buried roots of the fallen Giant, beneath the few remaining towers of brown bark and emerald leaf, do all origins begin.  And yes, it is here that this particular plot of land first came to be known as Tranziltor Park.

copyright (c) JMD, 2006

Tranziltor Park: Introduction (1/7)

2006-02-03T16:39:00.000-04:00

copyright (c) JMD, 2006

Oh, the many moments we spend trying to alleviate the subtlest -- but not least painful -- of all diseases: boredom. Here is an affliction which no modern doctor may cure, which no contemporary illumination may banish. Where does this dull gray germ of neutral negation come from? Possibly, and I do say this with utmost apprehension, from the very star that is its complete opposite: excitement. And the monstrous, golden machine that churns out the greatest quantities of this attention consuming excitement is none other than that which we cling to as most precious: entertainment.

Now there is an infinite difference in preference between each human as to what, in their discriminate eye, is deemed entertainment. Boredom is also loosely defined amongst the masses, but one thing that is certain to be universal among all 6 billion of them is the constant fluctuation between these two amorous creatures. (And yes, boredom is amorous, it is just that particular contender of affections of whom we cannot stand to be serenaded by, and who, quite fiercely, refuses with horrific tenacity to let us escape its repulsive cooing.)

I find myself enthralled by the one creature, raptly enfolded by its brilliance. But once this shiny one turns its glittering face, its beguiling dance is replaced by the awkward gyrations of its ugly twin. It seems that one child has been blessed beyond measure, both in outward respects and in the inward skills it possesses, and the other has been piteously cursed and given all of those qualities which cause those around it to despise and...well, yes, even hate. Oh, what to do?

Any remedial action to disbar boredom of its unwanted stay in the limelight results in the immediate return of entertainment. And, alas, here is the problem. For entertainment, by consequence of its very nature, exists only as a temporal ghost, conjured into existence to charm away its most hideous sibling. Thusly, entertainment’s enticing, effervescent eyes cannot remain indefinitely in front of ours – she is ever disappearing behind the oft jealous machinations of brother boredom. Furthermore, boredom is a blatant thief! To aggravate us almost beyond human capacity, any flick of the hair or turn of the head that is exhibited by the blessed one once too many times is rudely adopted by the cursed one, and the former is rendered powerless to ever delight us again with what used to be one of her finer essences. Because of this, boredom’s arsenal of monotonous self-appropriation widens dreadfully in scope and magnitude.

It is safe to say that boredom existed first. Where this disease originated from – I highly doubt it was in the depths of Africa, born in the fires of jungle heat as some have suggested – is decidedly unknown. Theories have arisen amongst the more learned of our society; in the colleges and in the great stone universities where brother boredom finds much solace in decaying books, creaking 19th century chairs, and ever-crumbling, bald figureheads. But these theories themselves have the defective tendency of being hatched out of boredom’s own basket, and as such are extremely difficult to follow and hard to endure. To explicate, here is one hypothetical question posed by an itinerant professor concerning derivation: “Could it be that Eve was led to bite the forbidden fruit -- not merely out of temptation -- but out of boredom?” In other words, was Eve bored with Adam and decided to try out an apple instead? A little humorous, perhaps, but not exactly gripping material.

Following this frustrating vein, allow me to take you out of the awful, disconcerting orchestrations of boredom for just a few moments (overall duration, of course, depends upon the speed by which you read) and present to you a particular kind of ancient entertainment perfected long ago as a very effective weapon against this diresome disease of ours. It is known simply, and elegantly, as “the story”.

copyright (c) JMD, 2006

A Sandcastle Story

2006-02-03T16:11:00.000-04:00

copyright (c) JMD, 2006

Someone told a story, an elegant epic that struck the hearts of humankind and brought forth an undeniable revelation. The story was discovered and then related with such exactitude that its reproduction was inevitable. This is not that story. If it was, you would have read a long foreword by now, penned by some vague professor of literature. Stories of magnificent caliber often undergo less than magnificent critique. People like to play with the dead, for after a great story ends and dies, there are hands and eyes and thoughts all over it. It is like a parade of worshippers who, secretly distraught at the cessation of their god, practice a kind of prolonged ritual of resurrection, hoping that in the sacred dirges of their appraisals the god will reappear like an echo, alive in heart and alive in soul.

No, this story is not so inspired, for it has crawled out of a lack-wit’s cavernous mind, a crippled creature hardly worth life, let alone critique. A great story soars down from above, alights like a dove and pierces with cries the air like an eagle. This story has come from the other direction, from below you, and so like a worm it is here on this page, a wriggling tube of letters and meaning and mud. But birds eat worms.

There is a main character, and we will just call him Protagonist, because his name is so unremarkable and becomes a nuisance rather than a joy to pass the eyes over. His nemesis, likewise, we shall call Antagonist. They are fighting with each other, these two, and the battle is long, arduous, and full of surprises. There are several secondary characters, of whom we will group into the Cast, and they for the most part support the Protagonist. Some of them sacrifice themselves, others are weaker and flee. There are hundreds of bit characters, drop pieces, and then millions of non-existent, assumed-to-be-there characters, one of whom is Samuel.

Samuel you never meet, he is not in this story. Or he wasn’t. As a writer I have taken the liberty to place an invisible camera over him, so that we may watch his every move. He doesn’t know it’s there. The Protagonist and Antagonist are ever aware of the cameras around them, and so they are constantly acting, sticking to the rigorous demands of a limpid plot and one dimensional, straight-jacket archetypes. Consequently they are never themselves, for cameras create self-consciousness, and performance is life. Samuel, however, is completely real and acts as he pleases. He is never, and shall never (as far as he knows) be in front of a camera. In fact he avoids them. Right now he is in the kitchen, washing dishes.

I know what you are thinking. You expect me to take this mundane being and turn him into something bigger. To exonerate his lack, to justify his normality, which can be seen as the sub-super, an ugly and unbearable gene that a story ought never to examine. No, our observations of Samuel will not glorify, and they will not trump up. They will not reveal that wonder in the worn-out, or the excitement secretly stowed beneath the boredom. That is what you want me to do – through story to provide the proof of intrinsic self-worth, even in the poorest, most unnoticeable of us all. But I will not sing to your soul. You are unsatisfied. Go find living water.

Samuel washes dishes. He is thinking about the girlfriend he does not have: the shape of her neck, how her voice sounds over the phone, what her eyes long to look at most. He is sad, because it is cold outside, and spring is very far away. His hands are getting wrinkly from the dishwater, palms included, for factory-work has left him with permanent gloves of overlapped callus. He has acne on his forehead, but this is not humbling. He is arrogant and knows darkness.

He will go to bed soon, an uncertain and dreamless sleeper. This night he will forget to brush his teeth, and regret it in the morning when the fuzz coats his gums. He will realize he is not the Protagonist, for his gums are lightly burning, and imperfection rests on him like body odor.

We don’t know when Samuel meets his girlfriend, or if he ever does at all. Perhaps he passes her in the mall, but is challenged by a well-crafted window advertisement, and so misses her. Perhaps she delivers his mail. Or maybe she’s even died fifty years ago, she born to early or he too late.

Regardless, nothing ever comes of Samuel. He dies. His body decays. The tremble leaves his eyelids, and the longing escapes his heart.

This is a story. It is over now.

copyright (c) JMD, 2006

A Letter

2006-02-02T22:04:00.000-04:00

My fiancée goes on vacation to the Dominican, and I sit in Chapters writing away my apprehension. copyright (c) JMD, 2006

It is a most inconspicuous letter I write, as you are away from me, and I feel the urge to communicate with you, even be it a one-way sort of communication, a monologue of zero. I am at a dinner party, beneath a canopy of trees, and there are people all about me – important ones, physicists, chemists, generals, and even a psychologist. I say this letter is inconspicuous in jest, for that is exactly what it is not, as I sit here amongst so many. I am listening and conversing with them absently, even as that silver pen you gave me Christmas last scrawls these letters. General Kaufman is saying “The horse was too small, and it began to sag in the middle like a rubber band…” It is a joke of some sort, but I refuse to relate the punch line. It is vulgar. Madame Cordone has just sat down beside me, and she’s looking at me rather forcefully, as though to sweep up my attention. I don’t look up, I say “Madame Cordone, how are you this evening?” And she says what she usually says, “Splendid”, and then “…whatever are you writing?” I shake my head and tell her it is poetry. She gives a petulant humph, like a small dog’s whine crawling up and then popping out her nose. She is leaning now, trying not to make it noticeable, so that she can see a little of what I’ve got down. Something sharper and more feral escapes her nose, and she’s almost fallen off her chair onto the lawn. Her arms are flailing, she’s an ancient chicken with resurging ancestral tendencies. She regains herself, and then whimpers “That doesn’t look like poetry, it’s all one block, like prose. What are you really writing?” “It’s poetry”, I assert, “I write it like this first and then shape it later.” She has no response to that but “You should talk to the psychologist, he’s an artist like you, Dobbs, but an artist of the mind,” and she thinks she is clever on that remark. “His name is John, he’s written a book too, certainly different than the kind you write – it’s on addiction.” “Really?” I’m not interested. I miss you too much, it’s all I think about, you on that island without me, four days beyond my grasp, an invisible star only I know exists beyond the southern horizon. I believe in you, and it has been revealed to me that the constellations of the night do not rotate around the stubborn North Star, but all turn to the south, pointing and surfing around you, their bright new Venus. The North Star now bounces across the universe, homeless, an abandoned lover lost and, for the first time in an eon, without his eternal family. I hear someone sit down across from me, and Madame says “Dobbs, this is John McCourtland. John, this is the wonderful Dobbs.” I admit, I glance up briefly, if not for anything by courtesy. My moment’s glimpse reveals him to be young and bland, boring. I continue to write as he sits there, but venture politely “What brings you to the country, John?” He says “The air and the horses,” which is a typical, safe answer. Yes, he is a psychologist. “I hear you are addicted,” I say – I can be monstrous, I know. He says, “Excuse me?” And I: “Your book. On addiction, Madame says. It is my experience that any work of magnitude takes a certain keen mental and emotional addiction. In your case you are addicted to addiction.” Now it is my turn to think I’m clever, you know how I grin. Cordone snorts. James, surprising tone “Why Dobbs, it seems to me that you are the addicted one.” “Me?” “Stop writing.” “I’m afraid I cannot, I have a deadline to keep.” “Writing another book?” Madame cuts in a sharp, disbelieving, “Poetry.” To which he replies, “I did not know you were a poet.” But I am barely listening, for I remember last summer when we stayed in all weekend, the profundity of your head on my chest, and the equally cosmic relevance of our inescapable descent into laughter when you pressed on my stomach with a misplaced elbow and made me pass wind loudly. To this day I wear the embarrassment like a glass over my eye, and it sparkles whenever you are laughing, my star, my bride. John says, “You are exhibiting all of the symptoms of addiction, Master Dobbs. Disassociation, fidgeting, the hunched posture.” Remember when we got the cats, how we joyed in their smallness, their tiny sounds and tender, but confident approaches to toy and food? Two cats, one female, one male, the female invariable smarter, the big black male a terror with claws. They make the perfect pair, not full grown, and though they have changed and scuffle at times (the male needs to learn about his size) they often succumb to slumber and each other, the moment of awakening an eager and delicate ritual of mutual grooming. “Truly, your attention is elsewhere, your gaze too far through your lap and into the ground beneath you. You’re smiling.” Remember when they first had catnip? “It’s all in my book, Master Dobbs. You should come in for a few sessions, I could help you. You see, your mind is revolving around the wrong planet, its orbit is askew. I liken the falsity of addiction to a satellite gone in the opposite direction, there are certain routes which…” but you are my planet, my love, my Venus, and my wings I have found have just grown, I can fly, and I will, across the sky south, for the North Star is free and finds great pleasure in the opposing winds of his natural compass. “…Master Dobbs, then the mind begins to deteriorate, and the thoughts become like a virus, a disease really, and I have discovered the medicine to…” I love you, I love you my star, “…mindless repetition increases and there is a sudden loss of connection…” I would rather dream of you than walk reality without your gaze, your shine, your light. Come home, come home, my love, I miss you and if I should cry again it would be in front of this psychologist, and he would pronounce me mad.

“Dear Master Dobbs…are those tears?”

Fiction Fix Begins; The Daily Roach

2006-02-02T21:57:00.000-04:00

This is the site for your weekly fiction fix. New posts every Sunday. Roughly ten posts were moved here immediately from Sudden Relevance, a blog now designated as a poetry and non-fiction cache.

The Daily Roach is a one-sentence scrap of discarded fiction, procured daily from the literary ashtray. These run from Monday to Saturday, followed by original fiction on Sunday.

UPDATE: (December 11, 2007) As you may notice, this ain't so daily no mo'. Well, I'm back for a bit, so I'll just be posting roaches and short pieces as I find them on my hard drive. I have quite a stack saved up, so should be productive for a while. Thanks for reading! Feel free to email me.