Science fiction, fantasy, mystery and what-not
When I sit down and open my computer, I perform a ritual of blowing away the debris that’s collected on the keys, the cookie crumbs, peanut pieces, and other curious-looking but unidentified things. I figure that my blowing should clear it away but it never does the job. That surprises me because people keep telling me that I’m a blowhard.
Guess I need to blow harder.
I was out walking. Spring and winter have been doing a back and forth. It looked like spring had seized momentum. Yellow daffs, Oregon grapes, clumps of orange, red, and yellow tulips, and blossoming trees gave our town colorful highlights that it usually lacks. Passing some houses that looked tired and neglected, I wondered about the people living behind the dirty windows and high weeds. Evidence of projects begun and never finished rests in piles of stones, dirt, and half-completed dirt. Some reason, then, I started streaming “Take Me Out”, Franz Ferdinand (2004).
Well, I knew it wasn’t some reason that I began streaming the song. It’s because these facades hid people who could be living the quietest and most desperate lives, dealing with pains, diseases, and medicines, aging and dying beyond the grasp of their dreams. I wondered about their quality of life. I wondered what they would say if they had the chance, and if any would ask, take me out of here.
Hence, take me out.
You ever have a bad case of verbalrhea, you know, where you just start running out of your mouth, and you can’t stop saying shit?
Man, I hate it when that happens.
With snow blinding me and an icy wind using a scalpel on my face, I thought I’d made a stupid fucking mistake. Lowering my head as far as I could behind the windscreen, I kept on the throttle, hoping that I wasn’t passing the trio or that I’d run ’em over. I should’ve been on them by now. I’d seen them on the cameras at the two hundred yard marker. They were almost stopped then. Since, the snow’d come on proper. No way they’d gotten closer to the house, I was sure.
I wasn’t completely stupid, though. I’d tied a rope to the garage ‘fore I left it and another to the buggy’s rear bumper. Even if I didn’t find the three, I’d been able to get myself back to the house. This had gone past being a rescue thing, acquiring an aura of a personal goal because I was remembering the time I’d failed. I wasn’t failing again. I hadn’t fought to live and survive just to fail helpin’ others. No.
Almost running into the pole I’d planted years before as a marker helped orient me. I’d deviated from a straight line by ’bout forty feet. Turning right, I squinted against the swollen battering flurries and drove into the wind, cursing myself, the weather, the people, my humanity, and my stupidity. Then, like a chance as I was passing ’em, a blue garment flashed at me on my right.
Jesus, I was passing them. Dropping off the gas, I swerved right and swamped the buggy in a snowdrift. Righting it with a combo body-lean, wheel turn, and burst of throttle, I twisted right. The blue loomed up. I aimed right for it. As I did, I saw obscured shadows that had to be the other two.
On their knees, the blue-clad figure was waving their arms at me. Wind tortured hair around an exposed white face. A mouth yawed open below dark, hopeless eyes.
I pulled the buggy in amongst them. Between me and blue, we wrangled the other two onto the buggy’s back. One of them was such dead weight, I was leaning ninety degrees toward the certainty that they’d died. I didn’t wanna drag a dead person home, but since I didn’t know indisputably, my course was set.
With them in the buggy’s shallow bed, and blue on the buggy’s passenger side of the sole bench seat, I grabbed the rope up and hit the gas for home. It was damn slow going, as I had to keep pullin’ the rope in and adjusting my course. My speed had to be kept down lest the buggy’s bumpy ride tossed the three rescuees out.
Dusk was grabbing the land and I was frozen exhausted by the time the rope led me home. Back into the garage, I pulled the door to and closed it up, just about shutting out the cold and the shrieking wind. Blue became livelier then, gushing tearful thanks at me. The other two were in greens, grays, and blacks, pants, sweatshirts, coats, hats, and scarves, anything, I guess, to be warm and protected. Still, it seemed like scarce stuff to be wearing in that shit outside. I wondered where the hell they’d come from, why’d they’d been out there, and why’d they’d been coming my way. With blue’s help, we got the other two out of the garage and into the house.
Gasping, sniffing back snot, wiping her nose, and pushing her dirty blond hair back, blue introduced herself as Lauren. Her friends were Gwen and Shalla. Shalla proved to be the unconscious one that I thought might’ve been dead. All looked like they’d missed soap and food.
“I’m Bill,” I told ’em, not my real name, but part of the wild Bill persona I’d created for myself. Don’t know why I used it instead of my real name but it felt right. The animals had come in to see what was going on, so I thought I’d introduce them, too. “Meet the Beatles. The shy cat hanging back is Ringo, and the darker tabby is George. Their mom is the bigger tabby, Paula. The husky is John.”
“The Beatles,” Gwen said with a wan, teary smile. Dark banks shuttering her face, her head dropped forward. As she fully slumped onto the floor, Lauren did the same, like the heat was melting ’em down after being out in the cold. In seconds they seemed as unconscious as Shalla.
The animals went about sniffing the comatose new arrivals as I gaped, grappling with what I’d need to do. They were the first people I’d seen in three years, the first women I’d seen in almost four. Though I didn’t really enjoy the prospect, I had to get ’em out of those cold, wet clothes, and into the bed by the fire. Once I’d done all that, I’d have to mark my calendar, cause it was an auspicious day, the day that three female survivors met the Beatles.
I just knew it was going to change my world.
I was writing several days ago, working on the novel in progress, April Showers 1921. I’d dream the novel, seeing the cover and knowing the main characters and a lot of story. Yet I was struggling to find and fulfill the potential the dream had shown the novel to have.
I plugged on, though, searching, testing, writing, and then tossing some of it away, trying to find the right path. Completing a scene, I went back over it, making minor changes. I uncovered a typo, an ess attached to a word, changing the noun from singular to plural. While laughing at the images that plural conjured, I deleted the letter, but then reconsidered what the plural could mean to the story. Within a few seconds, that extra letter and the shift from singular to plural opened up a new range of ideas. I went with it.
Results surprised me. That typo bloomed like algae, taking over that scene, but also illuminating masses of the underlying concept. The typo changed the main character’s interactions with others and shifted the entire story by several degrees. The typo opened unexpected mind streams. I surfed into new directions again and again, reacting with surprise, but also with satisfaction that this novel was becoming something different than how it’d been going. All of this is what causes fiction writing to be so engaging and entertaining for me.
Got my coffee. Time to write like crazy, at least one more time.
I dreamed my Dad and I were in a store, but a few caveats are needed to qualify this. Much younger, I was taller than I’ve ever been. Dad wasn’t my true father but a colonel I’d worked for in the Air Force. This colonel and I didn’t get along well. Fortunately, he wasn’t in my chain of command. He was the Deputy Base Commander, though, so I had encounters with him almost every day. Another colonel that I was buddies with told me that the other colonel had changed through the years. He said, “He used to seem so happy and had so much fun. Now he barely wants to smile.”
That was my Dad in this dream, not at all like my real Dad. Dream Dad was retired, and I was still active, and outranked him. Neither of us were in uniforms, though. These were matters that I knew.
We were at a Home Depot shopping for plants. Dad wanted to plant flowers at his house. I was there, assisting, following him around. Dad had become forgetful and clutzy. He kept knocking things over. I was concerned, amused, and exasperated as I followed him around and watched the Home Depot personnel cleaning up after his messes.
Dad and I were chatting through all of this, mostly about what he was doing, from what I remember. I began suggesting that we leave but Dad wasn’t ready. It went like this, me following him around as he carried a basket, looking for plants and knocking things over, until I quit following him and drifted away. After I did that, I heard a loud crash. Knowing that he was behind it, I trotted into another area.
A clerk stopped me. “Some hazardous stuff has been spilled,” he said. “We need to clean it up before anyone can go in.”
I looked into the room and saw my dream father standing to one side not far away. Clerks and customers were standing around the perimeter, arms folded, leaning against shelves, as two others cleaned up a mess in the middle.
“Just tell me this,” I said to the clerk. I pointed at Dad. “Did he cause this?” As the clerk nodded, I smiled and said, “That’s what I thought.”
The dream ended.
They count the money and measure the angles,
lamenting what must be done.
The cost is high, to keep people alive,
and keep profits a tidy sum.
“What can we do, it’s the America way,
“that made us what we are today.
“Blame the old and dying, the sick, injured and ill,
“for not making enough money
“to pay their bill.”
I pray for hope
I haven’t kept you too
long as I know that you’ll
always be the drink for
me and you, it always
seems like we’re getting lost in the
words can make a difference, especially how
they come and go through the spirals of
our changing lives and times because
what was once familiar has become
strange that I think of this now in
conjunction with where we’ve been and
where things have
gone are the expectations and
dreams are what keeps me
going for the goal that
I pray for hope.
Digging into his pocket, Chasm pulled everything out, dropped it on the counter, and took in the lifetender. Her neck and arms were lean and bare. Alabaster skin and sculpted coal black hair accented her blue eyebrows, green eyes, red pearl earrings, and brown lips.
Leaning forward, the lifetender watched Chasm’s discs take on green, gold, and silver. Her name holo said she was Kymeri and she was not available.
“You got something,” Kymeri said. Her long, flashing red fingernails raked the discs into order as their denominations came up. “Thousand dollar goldisc, a D, silver century, a wide array of greendiscs.” Her fingernails flashing gold, she tapped the individual discs. Each spoke its value. When she’d tapped the last greendisc, she clicked her fingernails together. Changing to green, her nail said, “Seventeen hundred sixty-seven dollars.”
Just short of a day’s pay, a reflection of the six hours Chasm had worked. “What can I get for that?”
“Night room, joy doll, two squares, dozen drinks, new clothes.”
“What would that leave me?”
“Depends on particulars.”
“Of course. There a budget package?”
Shaking her head, Kymeri said in a low voice, “You don’t want a budget. Get a deluxe, at least. You can afford it. Budget drinks are well liquor or piss beer with compiled food, and the clothes are plastic.”
“Can I budget and then upgrade the drinks to IPA? I don’t need many, maybe three bigs.”
Her fingernails flashing green, the lifetender said, “Okay, a budget room is a bed with a pop out commode, access to the ionizer, private sink, standing space and one chair.”
“Bedding?”
“Included. Joy doll?”
“No. Trade in for the clothes?”
The lifetender shrugged with a dispassionate scan over his black plastic-encased torso. “Your stuff isn’t much. Probably a ten.”
The negotiations were continued. When it was done, Chasm had spent eleven hundred. It scared him to spend so much.
He was ported into his pod. Soft white lights came on. No windows, one large monitor, doublewide bed, chair, sink, port token switch for the ionizer, and popout commode, as promised.
Squirming into the chair, Chasm guzzled his first IPA. Decent stuff, but most importantly, cold. Tension sloughed out of his shoulders. It’d been a good day. He’d found work and was promised more. He was off the street, had a clothing credit, two meals paid for, along with the IPA and water, and still had almost five hundred in discs.
Life was good. Kicking off his shoes, Chasm unfolded his laptop from his hip pocket and plugged it in to play some games.
For the first time in at least a year, he was looking forward to tomorrow.
Michael Seidel, writer 