Science fiction, fantasy, mystery and what-not
She didn’t wear a raspberry beret. Her capris were black, and her chill shirt was raspberry, with matching raspberry shoes and sunglasses, and short, raspberry and silver.
Seeing her, he gasped. Raspberry woman. He wondered what her secret powers were.
The house was always silent except for his quiet and her cats. He was aware of how much he sighed, and the cats…the cats were always darting underfoot, jumping up onto the furniture, counters, and tables, and peering around corners.
Flowers and plants were everywhere. He’d told everyone to send money to her causes in lieu of flowers and that shit, but…well, here they were. Here he was.
She was always trying to get him to eat healthy. The ‘frig was lousy with salmon and salad ingredients. Sighing (but what else?), he prepared the salmon per the instructions, sharing some with the cats, who were enthusiastic in their enjoyment, and made a salmon Caesar salad and poured a glass of wine for himself. Eating, he told himself, for her, chewing and swallowing the despised flavors, washing it down with wine.
For her.
Seven triple four began doubting his mission. The Kazmo believed he had a special insight into where the other versions of him resided. The Kazmo were correct, although it wasn’t as easy as they perceived. The silver machines didn’t know or understand that many of his other versions were fakes. Usually existing for about fourteen minutes, triple four suspected these other versions existed to distract the Kazmo and their resources.
That fact scared triple four. If he was right, his other selves knew about the Kazmo and their project.
They probably also knew about him, too, then. But if they knew about him, it could be that the fake others might only exist in his perceptions.
What he needed was a way to figure this out. If he couldn’t, he didn’t have a reason to exist.
Heat, humidity, and the long day induced weariness. Sitting on a bench in city hall’s shadow, he looked across the plaza. The crowds were thinning. Most of the holiday action was drifting into the restaurants or up into the park proper.
A middle-aged blonde woman danced with a child on the plaza stones. Each was dressed in purple and white clothes, and laughed, twirling their clothes as they spun around.
Deeply inhaling to swallow sad memories, he smiled. Sean’s passing had ripped his marriage apart. After the divorce, he’d remarried, but he’d never had another child. There’d been two, but both were gone. Sean was the end. He missed the laughter and movement that a child brought to a scene.
###
“Dance, mommy, dance,” Laurel shouted. Laughing, Melany recalled her childhood dance lessons and pretended to be a ballerina. After applauding, Laurel mimicked her movements.
Melany caught a glimpse of the man on the edge of her vision. Sitting on a bench, he looked like he might be drunk. She didn’t like the way he stared at them, like a predator.
Pretending she was out of breath, she collected Laurel. “Come on, honey. We’d better go find the others and get something to eat. Are you hungry? Do you want something to eat?”
“Yes, I am hungry.” Laurel took her hand and began marching away with giant steps. “Come on, walk like this.”
Giving the man one final dirty look over her shoulder, Melany followed her daughter to safety as the man finally looked away.
He was pleased to be going out with her. He’d met her at the coffee shop. She was a barista, and he was a regular. Three years older than her, it turned out. She was a student in her final year. He’d just graduated and was taking some time off in the area. Her eyes, gleaming jade and almond-shaped, felt like a laser cutting through him when she looked at him. She is it, he thought, with a wildly hammering heart. It turned out she was very funny and intelligent, studying English Literature, with plans, she said, “To be a CEO.”
They went to Louie’s for dinner, a safe place, none too romantic, with plans to zip over to Aqua to hear LEFT and dance after dinner — “We’ll see,” they told one another” — but then, sitting opposite him, laughing as she brushed a strand back off her face with a thumb — isn’t that endearing? — and her nails lack polish or gel, interesting! — he looked down at the table. She put her hands down, palms first, on the table, moments later.
She was speaking, but it was like light and sound left the room. Her hands on the table looked like giant spiders with long, slender legs. Thereafter, he couldn’t look at her without seeing her hands and noticing their resemblance to spiders. He didn’t understand at all, but it made him physically ill. It was easy to tell her, “I’m sorry, but I think we might need to call it a night. I’m not feeling well.” Then, as if his body felt that his declaration needed validated, he slapped a hand over his mouth, raced to the bathroom, and violently puked.
Looking at himself in the mirror as he washed up, he wondered, why? Perhaps he’d been drugged.
The next day, he went in for his usual coffee. She served him, concerned about the previous evening. He couldn’t look at her. All he saw were her spider hands. When he saw them, he immediately felt like he was going to be sick. Sighing, he left without drinking his coffee. He’d need to find another coffee shop.
It all saddened him. He’d liked that coffee shop, and he thought he loved that woman. A few days later, at The Roasting Company, he met another young woman. He felt madly in love with her, which shocked him – what kind of fool was he, falling in love so quickly and easily? – and he was leery of dating after spider hands, but she asked him out, telling him with a smile that he thought as intriguing as Mona Lisa’s, “Don’t worry. You’re in my hands now. I’ll take care of you.”
Her words startled him. He wondered if there was connection, but then dismissed it as silly, and accepted with pleasure.
“I don’t believe in the Holocaust,” he said with a challenging, simpering smile.
“What’s that mean?”
“I wasn’t there, so I don’t know that it happened.”
“It’s a well-documented historic fact. Millions of people died.”
He waved that away. “Papers. Photographs. That can all be faked.”
“And bodies in graves?”
“They can be faked, too. I wasn’t there, so I can’t confirm that it happened, and I don’t believe it did. Just like slavery. I don’t think it happened, either.”
My mouth fell open. “So you need to be there to know if something happened.” As he nodded, I said, “Are you a sports fan?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“How do you know that a game took place if you weren’t there? You can’t watch every game on television. Even if you could, that can be faked.”
He laughed. “Oh, that’s different, because I’m alive now. I’m experiencing it.”
“You were born, when, the early seventies?”
“Exactly nineteen seventy.”
I set my cup to focus on him. “The Moon landings began the year before, nineteen sixty-nine. Do you believe in those?”
“No, I don’t. There’s a lot of evidence that the entire space program was faked.”
“Then World War II was probably faked, too, right?”
“No, because my grandfather fought in World War II in the Pacific. He confirmed it was real.”
“But only in the Pacific, right? He didn’t serve in Europe.”
“But he had friends and other relatives that fought in Europe.”
“But not you.”
“Of course not. I’m too young.”
“Then you must not believe in Jesus Christ. You weren’t there when he was alive, were you? Or the first SuperBowl or any of the other football championships? You must not believe in Babe Ruth, either, or Columbus coming to America, right?”
He was shaking his head. “No, no, you’re wrong. Fake news to control the people is a modern pracitice that the United States government developed. Things that happened hundreds of years ago are true because people told the truth in that time. See, it’s just not the same.”
Travelin’ and unravelin’
leaving miles of web behind
tangled up with sticky notes
caught flat on my tongue
I see you in my mind’s mirrors
through a complex lens
hearing you
with jaundiced eyes
missing you
until I overflow
and crash
Bored and restless, he left the table in the cafe and walked to stretch his legs. He walked without thought under the trees, sometimes watching the traffic as he went or other pedestrians, but mostly looking inward, until he found himself at one of observation decks. It was empty. He stepped up to look out the windows.
Space seemed as empty as the observation deck. Readouts clicked, whirled, and blinked on panels of information presented in red, blue, green, and amber characters below the window. It all seemed too abstract for consideration. Three things remained concrete to him for now. One, he and his family had made it onto the Ark. Two, they’d left Earth behind. Three, he probably wouldn’t live to see the new world, but his son would.
Right now, those three things were all that mattered.
Beers glasses were raised and clinked together. Tastings followed. The trio got down to business.
“How’d it go with the date?” Ron asked Pat.
“Good, real good.” Pat smiled. “Third one, so you know what that means.”
Bryan laughed. “Is that what that still means?”
“Yes.” Pat nodded. “Indeed, it does.”
Ron raised his glass. “To your new girlfriend? Or is it too early?”
Pat grimaced. “It might be too early. She’s a swell person, wonderfully intelligent and accomplished, sexy, of course — ”
“Of course,” Ron said as Bryan said, “That’s a sexist attitude.”
“It is, but she is a knockout.” After glancing over his shoulders, Pat leaned in over the table. The other two leaned in as well. “The only thing is, she farts a lot,” Pat said in a low voice. “They don’t make any noise, so it’s not that, but they smell terrible.”
“She farts?” Bryan said.
Pat nodded. “And it’s not a little poot now and then. When she farts, I want to flee like the villagers running from Godzilla. And it’s not her fault. We’ve talked about it. She’d apologized after I complained about the rank smell invading my car. She told me it was a side effect of a medicine she’s been on a long time. She’s tried changing her diet and she’s looked into other meds, but nothing will work for her. And anxiety, like from dating, apparently makes it worse.”
“Wow.” Looking at Bryan, Ron sat back. “That’s a shame. A smelly farter. Damn”
Pat sighed. “Yeah, I’d hate for it to end for that, because she’s otherwise so wonderful, and I feel lucky to know her and be dating her.”
Bryan nodded. “Have you told her about your troubles in peckerville?”
Sitting back, Pat sipped his beer a moment and then smiled. “No. The way I see it, there’s no sense in telling her about that until I know if I can live with the farting.”
The dead voice comes from my girlfriend’s friend
She tried to tell what was to come in the end.
She said, “You think she loves you and she probably does,
but she’s a minute lover, and your minute’s almost up.”
I declined to hear her lines, I knew what the was, was.
Because I knew better, I knew how I feel, I knew the moment,
I knew my feelings were real.
That must count for something in a life of change.
If you can’t trust yourself, what else remains?
I told myself, she’s wrong, it may have been that way before,
but this sex is love, of that I was sure.
Fast forward the way that time flies in our lives.
Like birds we see in the corner of our eyes.
Here and then gone leaving echoes of their songs,
leaving us to wonder and question, where’s it all gone?
Michael Seidel, writer 