70) Magician Loser

    Larry plays the distraught magician to great effect.
    When the oak he’s bound to is struck by lightning the audience feel his pain.
    When he keeps losing at dice, even with his charms, the audience feels his loss and frustration.
    But when his fireball spell backfires and sets his cloak a light the audience laughs at him.

69) Vandalism

    The plastic bit into my wrists and the ones on my legs hurt too. The room menaced me with its flat white walls and hard corners. The lack of green and high frequency detail made my eyes itch. The lack of familiar smells and sounds made skin crawl and my nose felt heavy. The adjucant that I was assigned to promised I could go free as long as I just told the truth. I think he was lying. I had no reason to believe they would ever let me go home.
    The door opposite me creaked open and three men in black came in. The biggest of them stayed near the door as if I might overpower the other two and make a break for it. One sat in front of me and the other walked over to me and undid my bonds. The big guy walked back to the door and I sighed with relief.
    “So, Daniel. Tell us where you were last night.” It was the one in front of me speaking.
    “I don’t know why you’re asking. I’ve already told you a bunch of times.”
    “Pretend I’m hearing this for the first time.” He didn’t sound angry or mean, just bored. “And honestly, Danny, do you have anything else planned for the day?”
    I wondered if the one standing was going to hit me, but somehow I didn’t really care. I said, “Don’t call me Danny. Only my mom called me Danny.”
    “That’s a good point. Let’s talk about your mother. Why did you run away?”
    “My mother’s dead. You know that.”
    “That’s not what our records say. Our records say your mother, Susan Morey is alive and well in Atlanta and she’s very worried about you. Now, we wanted to wait for your actual arrest before contacting her, but you’ll cooperate, won’t you Daniel?”
    “She’s not my mother, you know that. Ok, just don’t call her yet, okay?” I was my own legal entity since I was fourteen so they didn’t have to call her, but if they didn’t it’d make my life very hard for a long time as she could probably get my personhood revoked.
    “We can only help you if you help us.”
    I started again, “Benjamin was the boss. He led us to the housing complex. He’s the one that suggested we put the brambles in there to protest something.”
    “That’s funny, Benjamin says you were the boss, Daniel.”
    I was angry for a moment, but pushed it through and let it pass. I’m sure they saw my fists clench. I hated being stuck with these men in suits. I tried to ignore them and tell the story, but justification won out. “You have his sequence, you know he’s DRD4 positive, you know he’s a novelty seeker, not me.”
    “So you say, Daniel.”
    “Ben found a gene printer in the dumpster behind school one night. He got Gerald to fix it up. Anyways, they got it fixed and we started printing things.”
    “What kind of things did you print out Daniel?”
    “Just simple things at first. A snail parasite. I thought that was gross the way its poor antenna bloated up. Then they made some plant pathogens. But they didn’t use them.”
    “You know that would have required an administrator password to make user generated seeds?”
    “No, I didn’t know. I didn’t know. I figured it was broken and they fixed it. I don’t know about computers much.”
    “Sure, fine, please continue.”
    “Then we printed some accelerated seeds. That was my idea. We crossed ivy and a black berries. They were so beautifully sharp and hot to the touch. I thought that was wonderful. I wanted to make more, but Ben got bored and wanted to do something really big. I didn’t see them for a week until he came to my bedroom window one night with a whole bag of teardrop shaped seeds. I swear I didn’t know what they were. I should have figured it out.”
    For some reason I stopped and looked up at them, expecting the suit to interrupt me again. But all three of them were silent. I continued.
    “I think he was on something because he talked really fast. It didn’t matter where we were going or what we were doing with Ben, it was always exciting. We got in his car. I think it was his car. Now that I think about it, it could have been stolen.
    “We drove for a while and he talked non stop about the hegemony of humans, how we were a one species eco system. He didn’t pause long enough for either of us to interrupt him. And even if you did try to say anything he’d roll right over you.
    “When we arrived at the construction site the moon had set, but we could still see the growing houses with our torches. He gave us each several seeds and gave us instructions on how to use them. He demonstrated by putting one in his mouth, swishing it around then spitting it out quickly. The seed steamed as soon as it landed. It burst open and nearly exploded into a pile of brambles it’s tendrils spread out and burrowed down into the ground. It looked painful.
    “Benjamin had us follow him into the closest house. He demonstrated again, but this time when he spat out the seed and it landed on the house’s tender floor and the brambles dug into the floor it began to bleed. I know they’re only plants, but it looked like blood to me in the dark.
    “I was scared, I didn’t think it was a good idea. But like I said we were all caught up in Ben’s plan. We’re weren’t separate people. We split up and started to break into the houses. I did one, but it made me sick to see the house bleed that I dumped the rest of the seeds into the brambles and tried to leave.”
    “Tell us about Gerald.”
    Startled, I had to take a second. It had already been said so many times and I didn’t want to say it again. “He swallowed a seed.”
    “We know that, but how was he as a person?”
    “Kind of Ben’s right hand man, I guess. I never saw them apart.” Without meaning to I started to cry. I couldn’t tell if it was shame or proper sadness as my heart was strangely quiet. “He, uh, wanted to be an architect. Not with plants I mean, like with dumb stone and dead wood. Weird.”
    “So, you saw Gerald die then?”
    “Yeah, uh. I heard him first after I had dumped my seeds and tried to find him. I think Benjamin ran away at that point. Gerald looked like he had fallen asleep with his head in the brambles and I threw up when I saw him. Then the enforcers came and you’ve seen all that.”
    I felt exhausted, but happy that tales of being beaten were an exaggeration.
    The man that was sitting said without looking at the other men, “I think we have enough, thank you Daniel.” He nodded and the standing one put the handcuffs back on me.
    Then they left and I found myself crying again.

68) Sky Arcs

    “Jim, hand me your phone.” I said.
    “Whu, what? Why?”
    “I gotta call my wife.”
    “Sure, but there’s no reception out here.”
    He fumbled in his backpack as I continued to stare at the sky. We had just crested a medium sized ridge and when we got out of the trees that thing was waiting for us up there. A huge curve of dark grey arced across the pale blue sky like a parody of a rainbow. The base of the structure was lost in early morning mountain mists, slowly turning the same color as the clouds before disappearing into the forest below. When the sun came a few hours later the nature of the structure was clearer, but in that moment it was simply an eery magical thing. That kind of thing that makes you want to call your wife and tell her you love her.
    I turned on the phone and waited for it to boot up.
    “What do you think it is?” Jim asked me.
    “Do those look like windows?”
    “Is it a building?”
    “Could be, I guess. It’s totally not on the map, I tell you that.” I laughed uncomfortably as I looked down at the phone, no bars, no connection. I turned off the phone and handed it back to him.
    “I told you, man.” Jim said snidely.
    “I just wanted to check.”
    Then the ground rumbled and knocked us off our feet. Jim slid in a patch of mud and tumbled down a few feet into a bush. Instinctively I reached out and grabbed a branch to keep from falling.
    I heard him moan from below and said, “You okay, man?!”
    He said something back, but I looked up and forgot about everything else. The arc had begun to come apart. Huge chunks were simply falling off. While keeping my eye on it I crouched and sorted through my backpack by feel, trying to find my binoculars and cursing my past self for not packing a camera.
    I could see Jim in my peripheral vision getting up and I was relieved, but I didn’t say anything. The sight of the crumbling mega structure held me. Petals of the material were peeling away and falling. It looked like a blooming rose crossed with an unwinding rope.
    Bingo! I found the binocs and whipped them up to my eyes. It was a building. I could see an internal structure to the petals, cables and thin sheets of material in layers. Then I saw the people falling out of it.
    “Oh shit, no way!” I shoved the binoculars into Jim’s hands. He took them without comment.
    I looked back at the area I had spotted the people falling out and they were still there, slowing falling in groups of hundreds, almost weightless and light and fluttering.
    “We have to go help them.” Jim said.
    “How? We’re not medics, hell I only have a dozen bandaids and some aspirin. How is that going to help? There must be hundreds if not thousands of people there.”
    “We can’t just sit here and do nothing.”
    We argued back and forth for a few minutes, but since we were headed out there anyways we decided to make the extra effort and try to help those people if we could.
    We stood to walk down the trail when another rumble shook the ground. This time I had nothing to hold on to and fell next to Jim in another bush.
    When we finally got up and out of the dirt the tragedy was gone. It was again a sane landscape. No more arc of a building dissolving and spilling out people, nothing but blue sky above and forest below.

67) Science with beetles

    Researcher checks airplane windscreens at the airport for bugs on windshields to do a survey of the flying insect highway.
    Finds a correlation between phylogenetic genetic markers and how high the bugs fly regardless of their size.
    Tracks that change back to the birth of flowering plants 200+ million of years ago.
    Finds pollen for that flower in amber and is able to resurrects said flower because it’s very similar to magnolia.
    As it blooms a thick haze of pollen seeps out and puts everyone in the lab in a coma, then the building, then the campus…

66) Night Missing You

    As we slept the crescent moon played softly against our faces. It must have tickled me more as I woke gently opening one eye then the next. The world was a blanket of silence and I wondered why I was so awake in the middle of the night again.
    I think I slept through the whole night last night, and maybe the night before, I can’t always remember. I’ve never left notes before this, I’m afraid you might have found them. I don’t know why I would be embarrassed. Lots of people get insomnia.    No wind blew through our bedroom’s open windows. The night’s warmth and humidity were standard summer fair. The world was so still even the mosquitoes ceased bumping against the net around our bed.
    Resigned to my fate I slid out of bed without kissing you goodbye, and parted the net. I had a little trouble getting one foot down on to the smooth carpet without slipping, but righted myself quickly.
    I wasn’t hungry, but I made myself a sandwich with left over lamb from dinner. I ate it mechanically and stared out the kitchen window at the garden in the back. The food was gone before I knew it and suddenly I had washed the plate and put it away. I was afraid the clank of dishes might have disturbed your sleep. I assumed I had cleaned the dish, but to be honest I don’t recall doing it.
    Is this just a dream? Maybe that’s where the anxiety comes from. In dreams nothing is solid. You can’t pick up a pen, write something down, give it to someone else and have them read it to you. So maybe this is more for me than you.
    In the next jump cut I found myself out in the garden out by the small stone castle, that one your father gave us when we bought the house. I sat down next to it and leaned against its parapets and wrote some more. I’ll probably tear out the pages before I go in a try to sleep again, it’s all nonsense anyways.
    The night is nice, I like it out here. It’s serene, like a keyhole without a key. I think you might like it.

65) House Crop

    Alfred walked along the deep trails through his crops. The fruit were mostly black and bumpy, some were still purple or green. He touched every few of the watermelon sized fruits for texture and ripeness. He knocked on them like he knew shoppers would once they were at market. Alfred was reasonably nervous, this was his first crop of houses and he had a lot riding on it, nearly a million credits in debt and his family displaced several thousand miles on the chance that the soil was right and mother nature would treat them right. So far they’d been really lucky, and he hoped it would hold out.
    He paused at the end of his field and looked down at the nearly endless rows of ripe tree houses. It still amazed him that only a year ago this whole area was wild grasses and sparse oak trees. Alfred heard a low buzzing off in the distance. He turned and looked to find a crop duster on its way. He looked down at his terminal and smiled. “Right on time!” he thought. He watched as the plane descended and its multi branched nozzles unfolded out from its sides like a giant metal mustache fingers. It zoomed over his head and began to drop its payload, billions of tiny helper mites.
    With such a complicated thing as a house fruit some details of construction can only be dealt with by microscopic helpers. That’s where helper mites come in. With fruit that was ripe enough the mites would burrow in and trim excess growth, help balance hormones, and deal with the wormy parasites that were prevalent that year. Each batch of mites was specially bred for each crop. Alfred had met the owner, a large woman of considerable humor and intimidatingly precise. He liked her a lot and they chatted quite often. There was a slightly cheaper crop dusting mite company a few counties over, but Alfred felt good with “Lacy’s Spray ’em Fighters”.
    The mites descended in a dense dark cloud and settled in the trees and did their business. Alfred thought he could hear them grinding their way through the fruit’s tough skin, but he knew it was impossible.
    He headed back to the house for breakfast, content and with a little skip in his step.
    The rest of the day went as usual. The kids did their chores, he went out to help his neighbor Farnsworth with his crop of knives, a few were coming up rusty and they were clogging up the harvester.
    When Alfred finally got home just before the sunset he was surprised to see his whole family waiting by the front door with their suitcases. He picked up the pace and ran the rest of the hundred yards to his house. When he got closer he could hear the crying.
    “It’s over, Alfie.” His wife Gertrude said.
    “What’s over? I don’t understand.” He leaned in to give her a hug and she started sobbing anew.
    He looked over his shoulder and saw Lacy and a couple of men at the dinner table. Lacy, who’d he’d only seen jovial and powerful was now dour and hunched over a pile of papers.
    “No!” He yelled as he grasped the situation.
    Lacy got up from her seat and slowly walked over to the front door. She said, “I’m sorry Alfred, it was a simple mistake. We thought we had enough fail safes in line to stop something like this. But, but, I’m really really sorry, we’re going to do everything we can to put this right, you know?”
    The blood drained from his face and before he knew it he was running through the house to the fields out back. When he jumped out of the porch he smelt it first, the rot and decay. The wall of stench barely slowed him down. His breath was ragged by the time he reached the first tree. He half slipped in the broken fruit on the ground, its melted latticework skeleton and shingles crunched under his feet.

64) Mask Man

    Once upon a time in a big city there was a costume shop. They carried the expected Halloween latex masks for children and enterprising young fellows with poor impulse control, abusive personalities, and a penchant for guns. But what they had down stairs was much more interesting. The owner, one Mr. DeLong (widower), would take you down there if you slipped him a twenty.
    What you’d see first is darkness, then of course he’d flick on the lights, but it would still be dim down there past the creaking stairs. As you rounded the corner there’d be DeLong’s pride and joy, his collection of historical masks. Huge wooden masks from native peoples all around the world, horned African masks and Inuit masks with tubes sprouting out of strange places and more. And maybe one of these masks would talk to you, prompt you to pull it down and put it on, just for a laugh. And you would go to pick it up off the wall and then remember where you were and who you weren’t. This is the modern world and there’s no need for such ostentatious masks. No, the masks we wear are simpler. The good husband mask, the goodly wife mask, the concerned lover mask, the attentive student mask. Our modern world is filled with masks, but we wear them on our minds. And you think that maybe these huge unwieldy masks were from a more honest time.
    And DeLong sees your frustration, so close to a newly found desire and restricted by the social contract of good manners. You can’t just pop up and take one off the wall and run with it. There’s no telling how old or valuable they are and you might break it. He laughs and walks up to the closest mask, it’s a little bigger than a soccer ball and covered in beautiful yellow and black feathers. You think it’s from some island nation. He hands it to you with a nod. You take it and its lighter than it looks. It’s soft and smooth, the feathers cover the entire surface. You turn it back and forth. The inside surface is made of some vegetable matter, maybe palm fronds you guess. You think you smell the ocean, but it’s gone before you can verify. And you pull the mask up to your face and line up the eye holes with your own eyes.
    And you wait for some electric knowledge to jolt through your soul, but it’s just an old mask. While holding it up to your face you look around the dimly lit basement at the rest of the masks and Mr. DeLong and you wonder how it would have been for the original wearer, what kind of ritual they performed with this mask. Was it a fertility ritual, coming or age, or a war dance? Or something else you don’t have a word for in your language?
    Enough time has passed for you to sample the mask and you reluctantly take it off your face and hand it back to DeLong. He takes it with a smile and an eyebrow wiggle. He puts it back up on the wall, but in a different spot than where he took it down from, and that makes the back of your hand itchy for some reason.
    Then there’s a phone ringing from upstairs. He motions for you to follow him back up the stairs. You do so and the stairs creak the same way and the light switch clicks off the same way, but you look down into the darkness in a different way then when you went down. You can’t tell if you’re deflated by the reality of the masks, just piles of feathers and wood, or if you’re feeling sour grapes because you know you’ll never go down there again.
    DeLong waves for you to wait, like he’s going to show you more of the basement. But he’s on the phone for a few minutes, talking excitedly in a different language, you can’t tell if its Greek or some Slavic tongue. And you want to stay, but there’s homework to do, or you have a date, or you’re hungry, or you just feel the pulse of the city outside pulling you back out.
    You try to wave to DeLong, but he’s well into his conversation and only when you leave through the door does he turn to you and wave back. You both smile.
    The sun is warm, or it’s raining. Either way it’s a comforting reality and you return to your life.
    You forget about that costume shop for years. For whatever reason you just never go by that block again until one day you’ve graduated or you have an new job or a new girl friend and the name of the street you’re on rings a bell and you wonder if that costume shop is still there. In this neighborhood sometimes dry cleaners are around for forty years while a posh restaurant can barely last a season. The city is capricious.
    The neighborhood hasn’t changed much. A few buildings have a new coat of paint and the cars are totally different. You walk up and down the street a few times until you’re sure you’ve got the right place, you can tell by the thin alley across the street, that memory is somehow the most vivid.
    And of course the costume shop is gone. People don’t wear costumes that much these days. There’s a bakery or a pizza shop or just boarded up windows there now. And you peek through the window and it’s just as advertised, the glare on the windows was hiding nothing.