Thursday, 2. July 2009, 12:48:53
sci-fi, fiction
As a little boy I'd dreamed of meeting a time traveler. I wanted to hear tales of the future and hitch a ride forward. Time moves so slowly for the young that the idea of skipping ahead a few pages is tantalizing.
Never in a million years would I have guessed that my time traveler would come from the past.
There was a sound like an explosion, and I rushed down to my workshop to see what had happened. I found a man sitting in a quaint machine which was full of dials and levers and blinking lights. The door had been locked, and at any rate the machine would've been too big to bring through it. I'd been in the workshop twenty minutes earlier. Given the impossible circumstances, his announcement that he was a time traveler made as much sense as anything.
The time traveler had bought my house in 1952, and used the workshop to develop his inventions. The time machine was his crowning achievement, and his first test for it was to come forward in time sixty years. That brought him to me.
"When I get back," the traveler beamed, "I'll be about the richest and most important person in the world. Everyone will line up for a chance to reveal the mysteries of time. I suppose you know that, you must've heard all about the inventor of time travel? I'm surprised there isn't a crowd gathered for such a momentous moment."
It was an awkward moment. I felt somehow that telling him the truth -- telling him that nobody believed in time travel -- would be a grave mistake. "I wouldn't like to explain," I replied carefully, "lest I tell you something that changes our history."
It hit me then how this lone traveler held the power to destroy my world. If he could go back to his time and do as he planned to do, history would be altered. Whenever history is altered, the present is gone and a new reality must replace it. If a butterfly flapping its wings in China can change the atmospheric patterns and eventually bring about a tornado in Kansas, an inventor with a time machine could destroy the world as we know it. Something as simple as a news bulletin could change my parents' schedules ever so slightly, so the same sperm and egg would not combine and I would never even be born.
I excused myself for a minute to search the internet for information about my guest. The results told me he disappeared without a trace in December 1952, and was presumed murdered. An insane man had been sentenced for the crime.
Perhaps destiny would take care of the meddler in time before he could tell the world what he'd done. Perhaps it was my destiny and my duty to prevent the traveler's return. The article said he'd vanished off the face of the earth. If he were trapped in the future, no one would find a trace in 1952.
I returned to the workshop and approached the time traveler.
"Will you give me a ride?" I finally asked, saying what had been on my mind since he appeared. "Take me ahead another fifty years."
The traveler smiled knowingly and shook his head. "I don't think a passenger would be a good idea."
His flippant dismissal made me mad, and set my resolve to stop him.
He turned his back to me and leaned over the controls to set them for his next jump through time. I grabbed a hammer from my toolbox and walked up quietly behind him. He never knew what hit him. I dragged his limp form into another room, tied his hands and feet with some rope, and locked the door.
Carefully, I got into the contraption. The rows of blinking lights and levers and dials were beyond my ability to interpret, but the big red button was clear enough, so I pushed it.
Stains on the floor evaporated. A chink on the edge of the table filled itself in. The tree by the window shrunk and vanished. It was 1952.
The explosion-like noise the machine had made on departure had caused the neighbors to call the police. The noise it made on return brought them running into the workshop moments after I materialized. My inability to explain the noise aroused suspicions, they determined I wasn't the owner of the house, and I was arrested for burglary. When the owner of the house was determined to be missing, a murder charge was added.
I told the truth. I confessed to assault, and explained that the body couldn't be located because he was sixty years in the future. I was found insane and am confined to an asylum for the remainder of my natural life. Long before my birth, I live out my punishment for a crime I've not yet committed.
My determination to see the future has thrown me irrevocably into the past.
Saturday, 13. June 2009, 05:20:42
fiction
Written to Gabrielle’s specifications. The weak of stomach and anyone currently eating should be warned that the specifications called for a horror story with a variety of specific unpleasant elements, and some graphic violence is contained herein. Critics are encouraged to blame the specifications rather than the writer. Fans are encouraged to salute the writer, not the specifications-creator.
The dark tower loomed over the low hills, illuminated by flashes of lightning as Gretchen approached. She came to the door and paused to look up the tower. A light flickered on above and shone out a stained glass window.
She knocked on the door. The tower came to life with the sound of the shuffling of hundreds of feet somewhere in the interior. There were shouts, a door slammed and all the noise stopped except for a single set of footsteps approaching the door.
The door opened to reveal a kindly old man with a cross around his neck.
“Welcome to our church, stranger.” He smiled pleasantly at Gretchen. “Are you lost? Do come in out of the rain and have a bite to eat.”
Gretchen nodded and shuffled in, thankful to escape the storm. The priest, as he identified himself, took her by the arm and led her into a small room.
“Help yourself to the food,” said the priest. “I must go now, I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
He shuffled off the way they’d come, and locked the door behind him. Gretchen was trapped. She thought nothing of it at first.
Hungry from the long walk, she walked over and opened the large refrigerator and freezer. She took out an unfamiliar meat and popped it in the microwave while pouring a glass of what she guessed to be red kool-aid. She took a bite of the meat and found it surprisingly good. The drink, though not kool-aid, was salty and interesting.
Gretchen waited a few more minutes after finishing her meal, but the priest showed no sign of returning. Unable to go out the way she came in, she went to the opposite door. It was unlocked. She opened it.
There was a large circular room with golden walls, six golden pillars, and a golden platform in the center. Gretchen stared in awe. Her awe slowly transformed into terror as the shimmering figure of a creature with the upper body of a ram and the lower body of a fish materialized above the center platform. The beast was looking directly at her, and extended a hoof as if to point.
Before Gretchen could react further, a bright light came on and the room suddenly flooded with people. It seemed as though they flowed from the walls. Each person was dressed in a golden robe. They silently encircled the ram-fish, joined hands, knelt and bowed their heads.
Finally, one of the robed figures spoke: “Oh great lord and savior, why have you summoned us?”
“My faithful followers,” the ram-fish began softly, “I have new food for you.”
It extended the hoof again toward Gretchen, who was still frozen in place by shock. The golden-robed figures turned and looked at her. One lifted a hand and motioned to something behind Gretchen. Thundering hoof-beats burst through the doorway behind her, and the horseman grabbed her in a single motion. As he tied her to the back of his horse, she looked at his face. There was nothing there. He had no head. She screamed in terror.
With his quarry secure, the headless horseman galloped onward to the center of the room. He placed the terrified, now muzzled figure of Gretchen on the platform above which the ghostly figure of the ram-fish still hovered watching approvingly. The horseman’s job was complete, and he galloped out as quickly as he’d come.
The robed figures broke the circle and walked outward to walls. Each reached into his or her robe and pulled out extra long false fingernails, applied them, and began scratching against a special blackboard strip of the wall. Gretchen tried with every remaining ounce of strength to pry her hands loose from the ropes so she could use them to cover her ears. Her efforts were fruitless, she could only grimace in agony amidst the noise.
At once, the fingernail scraping ceased and the robed figures turned their attention to the doorway. The priest walked through it carrying a CD, and inserted it into a player. The room was filled with the sounds of children haunting a house, emanating from speakers in all corners in 5.1 Dolby Digital Surround Sound (TM).
The priest walked to the platform, and the circle rejoined and closed in behind him.
“Hello again,” he greeted Gretchen, smiling amiably. “I trust you enjoyed the leftover meat and blood of our last visitor. Now the time has come for you to join him in the freezer.”
The priest drew a long blade from his belt and held it a moment over the body of the terrified woman who stared up at him pleadingly. He then plunged the blade downward, and there were muted screams through the muzzle. He chopped and chopped, stripping meat from bone and cutting Gretchen into small portions suitable for sandwiches, while allowing her blood to pool in a container below.
The ethereal ram-fish looked on and spoke warmly: “You have done well, my disciples, and have brought more glory to our First Church of Jesus Christ, Cannibalistic Ghost Ram-Fish. Enjoy the banquet.”
Tuesday, 24. February 2009, 19:22:02
short, fiction
An old man sits quietly on a park bench under a tree. He watches the shimmering waters of the lake. He watches the ducks gliding gracefully across the lake's surface. He catches sight of an otter and tracks it with his eyes as it bobs up and down between the bright sunlight and the murky depths.
The man listens to the birds and the breeze, and to the voices of the people who pass behind him. He hears old friends wrapped in conversation, a young couple laughing at a shared joke, the playful cries of children.
He never turns, but he imagines the scene behind him. He imagines the smiles of the young, the long confident strides of successful business people on lunch break, the slow gait of lovers soaking up the afternoon, children skipping along without a care in the world. They wear their hopes and dreams on their sleeves.
The scene is fragile in his mind. The people behind him are beautiful glass sculptures ready to shatter at the force of his turning to see. The nature ahead of him is solid as a wall.
The world freezes. He reaches out to grab a clump of air in his hand, and reshapes it. He stands, walks to the shore and picks up a duck. Thoughtfully, he poses it at various angles and steps back to evaluate. Finally he places it in the water pointed out into the lake.
At last the old man turns to the people behind him. He separates two fighting children. He moves a couple's hands to clasp each other's. He moves two women's heads to make eye contact as they approach each other, and twists their mouths upwards into slight smiles.
The old man walks back to his bench and turns about to survey the scene.
"It's perfect," he says aloud.
The fragile piece of air he reshaped earlier cracks from the force of his voice. He reaches out to fix it, but it shatters at his touch, leaving a small flaw in the middle of his perfect world.
A drop of rain falls from the sunny sky. It leaves a streak in the air behind it. More drops fall, and the world is smeared like a wet painting.
A clap of thunder shatters the world into a thousand pieces. A hand on the old man's shoulder shakes him awake.
"Are you okay?" a voice asks.
He opens his eyes and looks at the man who shook him awake.
"I'm fine," he replies. "Must've fallen asleep."
"The park is closing," says the stranger. "Time to go home."
The old man stands and looks about. He sees the gray skies and hears the distant roar of traffic. He steps in a pile of goose excrement. The illusion is gone.
The cold rain intensifies as he trudges the muddy path back to his car. He sits in the car a moment, watching the rain wash the dirt off his windshield and listening to the steady patter. He sighs, takes a final look behind him and heads out into the evening traffic.
Sunday, 15. February 2009, 09:31:43
mst3k, fiction, coily
The leaf blower picked away at my brain, slowly and surely, like a chisel. It was a Friday like any other Friday. I sat entrapped in my apartment as the beast circled below for hours. I turned up the volume on my noise-canceling headphones, but it was no good, the whir remained incessant in the background.
"I wish all the leaf blowers in the world would just vanish," I said aloud.
The noise stopped. The world was still and silent, blissfully at peace as never before. I went to the window and saw the landscape maintenance professional standing dumbfounded with nothing in his hands.
"No leaf blowers!" exclaimed a shrill voice behind me.
I twirled around to come face to nozzle with a tiny leaf blower sprite.
"I'm Leafy," it said, "the leaf blower sprite! I heard you wish away all leaf blowers, and decided I'd grant your wish."
Overcoming the shock, I got down on my hands and knees. I looked up reverently at the tiny sprite on the bookshelf. "Oh thank you, thank you," I said. "How can I ever repay you?"
Leafy wagged his nozzle disapprovingly. "You'll regret this. Leaf blowers are a vital part of modern life, and I've only granted your wish to show you how wrong it is."
My reverence for my seeming-benefactor evaporated. I stood and spoke face to nozzle again. "No one," I asserted, "could possibly invent a more useless device. It moves leaves from point A to point B so that the wind can redeposit them at point A for next week's repeat."
Leafy let out an angry blast of hot air and proportionately miniature leaves. I coughed and covered my face.
"Don't make me mad," Leafy implored. "You wouldn't like me when I'm mad."
I backed up and put my hands in the air apologetically.
"You're not so hot yourself, you know," he continued. "I've been watching you. You go from home to work and back again in the numb routine of your life, never deviating. You've never contributed anything of value to the world. You live in this ugly box of an apartment, indistinguishable from a thousand neighbors."
"Granted," I replied, for there was truth in Leafy's words which I could not deny. "But all I've ever asked of life is be allowed to sit here undisturbed in a comfortable silence and forget that there's a world out there."
"At the cost of the happiness of others?" he queried. "You're despicable. Leaf blowers bring hope to the lives of many thousands of illegal immigrant families, offering employment when all the other jobs are taken."
"Can't they become migrant farm labor instead? That's actually productive."
I ducked just in time to avoid the blast of air and leaves.
"Fine," he barked. "Try it out. You'll be crying for me within the hour."
Leafy vanished, and I was alone with my thoughts. The world was as silent as could be, free of distractions at last.
I picked up the sudoku puzzle which the noise had prevented me from finishing. After twenty minutes I set it down again, frowning, realizing it wasn't the noise that'd stopped me.
I sat down at the computer and tried to get some work done. I couldn't.
For all the peace outside, there was no peace in my mind. Random thoughts fluttered across my field of consciousness, defying my attempts to organize them. Slowly they began to organize along their own patterns. "What are you doing with your life?" one asked. "You really aren't any better than a leaf blower!" spat another. "Now what are you going to blame for your inability to think?" taunted a third.
The thoughts floated at me like leaves. I wanted nothing more than to blow them out of sight, even if they might find their way back another day.
"LEAFY!" I screamed. "You win. I surrender."
He reappeared with a triumphant smile, if you can imagine a leaf blower smiling. "What have you learned?" he prodded condescendingly.
"I've learned that there's nothing worse than having nothing to distract me from my thoughts," I conceded solemnly. "I've learned that unproductivity feels a lot worse when I don't have a distraction to blame it on."
"So what do you think of leaf blowers now?" he queried.
"They're the annoyance that makes life livable," I said. "They're the scapegoat that absolves us of our failings. The blessed distraction which keeps us from collapsing into ourselves. The leaf blower is our anchor to the world."
Leafy nodded. "Let there be leaf blowers again!" he exclaimed.
My world was filled with noise... deafening, wonderfully annoying noise.
I tried to thank Leafy for the new perspective he'd given me, and I think he tried to say something to me before he vanished into the netherworld of sprites, but we couldn't hear each other.
Sunday, 19. October 2008, 06:58:29
fiction, first person, experimental
The small cove carved a semicircle out of the sheer cliff face. On three sides the rock rose a hundred feet above me, on the fourth the ocean lapped at my feet. I had no idea who I was, how I got there, or how I could ever leave.
There's something mystical about the meeting of sky with ocean. The calm of the smooth, seemingly endless surface hides the unfathomably complex world of the depths. The quiet pinpoints of light in the night sky hide the fury of a billion suns and planets stretching to infinity. We think we see the sky, we think we see the ocean... we can never really understand them.
I was as much a mystery to me as the sea and the sky. Vague images and ideas danced about, concepts of a world filled with people and random bits of knowledge, but the only thing I could be sure of was the cove. There were no footholds to climb out, no openings to peer at the wider world... only the tiny beach and the vast ocean.
To be trapped with an infinite expanse right in front of you, taunting you for not being able to explore it... it's worse than being shut in a box. I couldn't remember if I knew how to swim.
As the night wore on I fell into a restless sleep there in the sand. I dreamt of a majestic ocean liner. I waved frantically, and the passengers on the deck waved back cheerfully as it passed away. I cursed them. They couldn't hear me, they wouldn't understand me.
I awoke with a start, spitting out the cold salty water which washed over me. The tide was rising. The cove was almost gone, just a few feet of beach remaining at the base of the cliff.
Standing back against the wall of rock, I watched the ocean paw at my feet. I envied its boundless freedom... yet it seemed the ocean envied me the land. Waves beat relentlessly upon the shore and grind it into sand which can be sept out to sea with the tide. In capturing the land, the sea destroys it and frustrates its purpose. The sea can never know the land without changing it, as the land can never know the sea and neither can know the stars.
There was a hint of dawn on the horizon, a slight glow which washed a layer of stars off the edge of the world. The songs of the birds filled the air.
The cove was gone. The sea rose to my ankles, the waves hit my knees.
There was a choice. There was the paralysis of the known, a cold beating by the waves which would subside in a few hours to reveal the desolate but familiar cove. There was the unknown, around the corner, blocked from view... maybe life, maybe death.
I watched a seagull fly over me to land on a small rock a hundred meters out to sea. It sat a few minutes, then turned back to land I could not see. It was simple for the seagull.
No more thoughts. No more indecision. I waded outward. As the water rose around me, a memory rose within... a windy gray day at an isolated beach, myself as a child looking out at the same rock from a different angle and wishing I could swim to it. I remembered how to swim. My arms and legs creaked into action after their long disuse, and minutes later I pulled myself up onto the rock.
The whole shoreline was revealed. A beach, trees and the continent beyond. At one end a hill rising to form the side of the cove. There were no giant obstacles, no hungry sharks, no long impenetrable walls... none of the things I'd imagined.
I swam for the shore. There was no rescue party waiting, no one to help me, no sudden epiphany about who I was. I was still alone, but I knew the whole world was there for the taking if I would only go and meet it.
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