Hands wrapped around an imaginary cup of tea, the ghost waited patiently in the green vinyl booth seat while I set down and arranged my gear. If my laptop and smartphone were unfamiliar to him, he made no indication of it and instead stared directly to the front with a slight, nervous smile on his lips.
"Even though I lost my faith at a young age, I always believed in an afterlife," he said, quietly, shifting soundlessly in his seat. "I've never felt less joy about being right."
I tried to lighten things up. "Well, if you'd been wrong, we wouldn't be able to have this conversation, right?"
"Yes, well, there is that, I suppose." He paused. "Anyway, I'm sure you didn't seek me out to discuss my theories on the persistence of post-mortem intelligence."
"No, no, you're right, you're right. Heh. As it turns out, you've been right about a lot of things, Alan."
His smiled a little more distinctly, looking down to where his cup would be as he said softly "So I've noticed. I can't properly touch anything, but I've seen a great deal in the last few days. You people have worked wonders with making things small," he said as I followed his eyes towards my iPhone.
"Ah, yes. Yes, I suppose this must look like magic to you."
"I supposed it must do. I suppose it couldn't conceivably be a calculation engine, miniaturized to a great degree, as well as a wireless telecommunications device, speakers, microphones, et cetera. Storage of some sort, probably magnetic since the mechanical devices we had wouldn't scale to that size. Oh, and a very small television screen that can't possibly be using cathode tubes but it's a television nonetheless. Clearly magic."
"Ah...yes, well..."
I scowled. This was, after all, one of the greatest minds of the 20th century. You forget that sometimes when you're talking to a man you can see clean through. The man I could see clean through gave no indication if he was amused by throwing me off my game or disappointed that I'd underestimated him so badly. He just stared distantly out the window. Duly chastened, I started again.
"Well, let me get to the point then. What brings you to the U.S.? I've been asking around your, um, community, and none of them have any idea."
"Community, you say? Do you mean "mathematicians" or "dead men?" Never mind, it doesn't matter. Let me start by saying that I'm as much in the dark with respect to what brings me from place to place as you are. I have some theories, but my opportunities to test them with the proper rigor are, shall we say, limited by my condition."
"That said, there does seem to be some degree of guidance in my manifestations. More often than not, I find myself in times and places that possess some connection to me or my work. For example, I was on hand when a program of logical operations took part in a televised quiz show on your west coast."
"You mean a computer?" He waved his hand dismissively.
"No, no, the computer is just the machine, the chassis in which the operations are performed. It's the brain, perhaps, but not the mind. Anyway, I suspect I will be back in England next year. I understand there's to be a centenary celebration of my birth."
"Oh yes! They're calling it 'The Alan Turing Year.' A celebration of your contributions to computing, biology, genetics, cryptography, artificial intelligence, if I understand it correctly."
"Hmm...these things, cryptography, artificial intelligence, genetics, these are things people are interested in? My contributions are well known?" His tone suggested that, despite hoping he was wrong, he knew the answer already.
"Well, no. Not widely. But the people that do care about these things are genuinely excited by the event. You were ahead of your time, you know."
"I'm afraid I don't know. I was very much of my time. It was my time, after all, that let me study with Wittgenstein. It was my time that made Einstein's work available to me."
"Now he was ahead of his time."
"Rubbish. He was just following up on Gauss' work. Don't try to romanticize it. There was nothing romantic or magical about it. I happened to exist at nexus of ideas that allowed me to piece together things that were, for the first time, possible to stitch together. If not me, then someone else."
He paused, gathering his thoughts, his intense eyes still distant.
"It was my time, too, that made my life one of scandal and ridicule. I was, you know, forced to take chemicals that would cure me of my so-called 'deviancy. Ironic that England would make a show of celebrating my life. They couldn't wait to sweep me under the rug when I was alive and I think they were relieved when I ended their embarrassment by my own hand."
I wanted very much to ask him about the apple, but ghosts are, by nature, fleeting creatures, and not prone to overlong conversations. He seemed to be on a roll and I didn't want to interrupt.
"The madness of it still bothers me. More than that, it angers me. Sixty-some years on, and I'm still angry. Not so much for me, but for our entire species. Are we so petty, so threatened by differences, that we feel we must destroy a man who, and I won't stoop to false humility, a man who contributed to extending the reach of mankind's knowledge as much as I did? Where is the sense in that? How can rational beings act in such a pig-headed fashion?"
His shoulders slumped slightly, only slightly and for the briefest of time, before he gathered himself again.
"Still, I think I know what it is that has brought me here, now. Do you see those two gentlemen across the street? The ones looking into the shop window?"
"Sure. The tall guy with the bald spot and little blond fellow with the white pants."
"Exactly. I've been watching them for some time. Their hands are clasped in a way that leaves no doubts. And that is, if I am not incorrect, a jewelry store they're looking into. They are looking at rings, are they not?"
"Could be. Kind of hard to tell from here."
"They are, they are. I've counted three police cars passing them in the last 15 minutes and not one has stopped."
I smiled. For the first time, I think I may have been a step or two ahead of him.
"These gentlemen are clearly sexual inverts. No,they're queer, there's no doubting it. They're making no effort to hide it. And, what's more, no one is taking any notice of it. And the jewelry store..."
"Yes, Alan, I think they could well be looking at rings." His eyes never moved, but his features softened and a touch of wistfulness crossed his face.
Alan Turing squared his shoulders to me grinned just a little, and said "Yes, of course they are. Of course they are." Then his eyes returned to his non-corporeal cup of tea. "Ahead of my time after all."
Fade Away, Radiate
...and then I was in her laundry room, desperately looking for a way to get out. I tensed up with dread, although I couldn't tell you exactly why. The washing machine was at least three feet deep, but there was liquid at the bottom of it and this told me that climbing into the machine would not get me out of this room. Panic. The door opened. I knew these people even though I couldn't see their faces, but I knew them, you see? That was the important part. They never turned to face me, even though we were now in their living room, filled with smoke and dark woods and I think it smelled of whisky. They told me my parents would be mortified to see me like this and I had to agree even though I had no idea what "like this" meant. Why were the collars of their shirts so high? I was going to have to choose and I couldn't bring myself to do it. I wanted both but had to chose only one and they were both women who would make good brides but I could have only one and I would probably never see the other again and neither of them ever did anything bad to me but by choosing one I was rejecting the other wasn't I and she didn't deserve it she had done nothing wrong so much shame. Then I looked down and saw the cats in the shelter and suddenly...
My Father's Garden
The same writing prompt, a somewhat more obvious take on it:
Depending on how you view such matters, today was either the first or the last day of my natural life. I will leave it to you, the reader, to judge which best fits my peculiar situation. I trust your judgement more so than I do my own for reasons which I intend to make clear in short order.
This being the summer prior to my senior year in high school, my parents permitted me to choose the destination for our family holiday. I had always been fascinated with the vast, mysterious caverns of the American west, but my experience with them was restricted to what I had read in books. These books told curious tales that whispered of sights that would challenge the sanity of even the strongest man. On the cusp of manhood, I had come to regard these stories as superstitious hokum, but they still held no small amount of lure for me. My mother felt that this was a marvelous idea and, although he protested, my father eventually relented and we booked our passage.
On the third of June, we arrived in Carlsbad, New Mexico to take in the fabled caverns nearby. The caverns were indeed vast and impressive, but they somehow failed to spark my imagination in any way. The enormous hollows under the desert felt inviting and warm in a way that my books never described. I chuckled naively to myself when no strange figures appeared where the lasts rays of the electrical lights failed and the darkness loomed. Perhaps science and civilization had chased the hobgoblins of my childhood completely out of this Earth!
We boarded the Cumbres and Tolec to visit some of the lesser-known caves north-eastern New Mexico. We stopped in Dulce on the sixth amid a storm of dust such as I have never seen. I saw what I was sure were enormous buildings whenever the storm would clear slightly, but my father insisted that I was being foolish and I was just seeing the top of the nearby mesa. My mother merely smiled quietly as father continued to lecture us on the local topography as he read it from the tour guide.
The crude, hand-painted signs directed us out of the small town and down deep, lifeless gulch. We approached the entance to the caverns without the escort of a clutch of tourists as we had in Carlsbad. Curiously, even with the obvious lack of visitors, there was a shack, presumably a shop, on the path to the cavern mouth. I thought it would be fitting to bring back a memento of some sort, if only out of sympathy for the poor fellow whose lot it was to maintain this shop in vain hope that a traveller might wander by.
The store was, much as I expected, dusty and still and only half-lit as though even the little bulb was weary of being here. I regretted my decision to enter almost immediately. I quickly scanned the small, wooden room for anything that I might purchase to discharge my presumed duty to the shopkeeper.
I almost didn't notice the gentleman who was presumably the owner of the shop. He was settled on a rough wooden stool, perhaps asleep, and looked as dingy and old as everything on his display shelves. If he moved even slightly when I entered his store, I was not able to discern it.
My eyes played quickly over row upon row of toy wooden cabins, horses, pipes, mugs and even just slabs that appeared to exist solely to display the inscription "Dulce Caverns" on their sides. I wanted something other than the banal curios and looked over at the gentleman behind the counter and thought better of it. It was then that I noticed a bin of green-grey coins on a shelf on the wall .
Expecting to find them stamped with "Dulce Caverns" or something of that sort, I picked one of them up. I nearly dropped it immediately as it was cold to the touch even in the southwestern heat in early summer. I squinted and examined it more closely. The large, sand-dollar sized coin had non-sense words scribbled on it, but when I flipped it over, there was an inscription of what appeared to be a starfish, if a starfish were somehow elongated into a tube and festooned with cilia or something.
It looked strange, even sickening, but it was also familiar.Immediately, I was reminded of what my mother always called "father's garden." Behind our home, where the back lawn slopes down to a creek and a dark, wooded area, we have a garden that is surrounded by a white-brick wall that is, at a minimum, fifteen feet tall. There is a solid iron gate on the front of it, and the gate is locked at all times when mother is not tending it. My father being a strict man of puritan upbringing, I was forbidden a great many things. However, it was my mother that insisted that I not visit father's garden.
Clarissa and the Bread
"Here's the story: A young person walks to the store and along the way finds a coin, picks it up, and remembers something important. Then a car drives by and the person goes home.
Choose a writer that you love and tell this story mimicking their style in 100-200 words. (Averages out to be a single page). Feel free to add more to the story of course, but this template is the minimum. Shouldn't take you longer than an hour. Give yourself permission to be bad at it. "
Clarissa was fond of, among many other things, books. She was fond of Unicorns and talking bears and fairies and witches (even if she found them a bit scary) and dancing teapots and many a good many things beyond. Books, however, were the common thread that encircles most of the things she loved. If she weren't eight years old and instead were, say, an investement banker, she might draw you a Venn diagram demonstrating how the things she held the most dear were contained almost entirely within the enveloping circle labelled "books." However, Clarissa was, in fact, six years old and not remotely interested in being an investement banker, so there you have it.
Clarissa's father was fond of books as well, but she was concerned that Clarissa's fondness bordered on the excessive. He felt that she was just a little to involved with her Unicorns and talking bears and fairies and witches for her own good. He was of a generation that felt that there was nothing more beneficial to children than Fresh Air. Copious amounts of Fresh Air, salted with a little Honest Work to show one the Value Of A Dollar were his idea of an ideal recipe for a happy, healthy child. The fact that these things would also result in a quiet child who might be inclined to turn in early and not get underfoot were just side benefits that he seldom mentioned.
Clarissa's father was also fond of cheese sandwiches on fresh, chewy bread. As it happened, he had a small, soft wad of cheese from one of those French towns that had too many decorative swirls attached to the letters and it practially begged to be spread on a slice of sourdough and savored by a man who appreciated such fineries (even if he didn't know exactly how one pronounced the decorative swirls on the French letters). Alas, the last of his bread had been discovered by an enterprising mouse (he called it a mouse for his daughter's sake though he knew better) and now all he had left were a few, sad crumbs that not even a suspiciously rat-like mouse would see fit to take.
Which is all to say that Clarissa was pulled abruptly from an interesting discussion on humane preparation of toads with an unusually friendly witch by her father's booming voice extolling the brightness of the sun and the mildness of the weather. She sighed and closed her book. She knew from experience that when her father summoned this much gusto in describing the out-of-doors, there would be no avoiding whatever task he had in mind for her. He suggested that she would benefit from a brisk walk through the little park down the street from the townhouse Clarissa and her father shared. He scratched his beard as if in thought and then suggested, as though it had just come to him, that since she was heading that way anyway, she might as well stop at the bakery since it just happened to be next to the park.
He handed her a a few coins and, beaming, saw her out the door. He briefly lecutred her on the value of getting out into the Real World and being among Real People and feeling the Real Breeze on your skin. That was all good and well, thought Clarissa, but she suspected that she would have been left along with her Unicorns and bears if her father hadn't wanted some Real Bread. There was nothing to be done but to get it over with, so she set off down the warm, white sidewalk, carefully avoiding the cracks, and dodging around the shadows cast by the other townhomes on her street.
Clarissa resented her father's emphasis of the word "real" whenever he escorted her out the door. His idea of "real" seemed not just limited, but insultingly patronizing to her. The more she thought about it, the higher her dudgeon. Soon she was so caught up in her annoyance that she no longer avoided the shadows and he feet dropped squarely across more than a few cracks in the sidwalk. So caught up, in fact, that she didn't even see the boy in front of her until she knocked into him, jarring the coins loose from her hands...and his as well.
The sidewalk sparkled with little silver and gold disks spinning out their decaying orbits around unseen planets. Before even looking up, they both dropped to their knees to pick up their lost coins. She picked up one, two, three silvers and then a dull grey one that was so cold it almost burned her hand. She opened her palm to make sure she had the right ones. She had two Jefferson nickels, a Mercury dime, and...
A dragon?
She looked up at the same time the boy did. She was so shocked by the coin that his gold-green eyes and strangely pointed ears didn't register. She just stared, motionless, jaw slightly open. The boy recovered first. He snatched the dragon coin from her palm, stood up suddenly, and dashed across the street. Clarissa followed his movements without saying a word.
When the boy reached the other side of the street, a car thundered up the lane in directly in front of him. If she had been versed in such things, she might have recognized it as an '18 Gaile-Carpat, complete with brass-plated double-boilers and the bronze wyvern-tail above the exhaust, but instead, she continued to stare in equal parts shock and wonderment. The boy looked back at her, caught her eye, and raised a single finger to his lips in a gesture that marked the only comprehensible aspect of encounter. The recognition broke the spell and Clarissa found herself able to move once more. She nodded, gently but distinctly.
Then she blinked.
Then the car was gone.
Clarissa stood up, looked around to see if anyone had noticed anything. She was disappointed but hardly surprised to see that everyone else had completely failed to notice had just happened. She checked the coins in her palm, but the only faces that stared back at her were familiar presidents and Gods. She sighed heavily and opened the heavy double-doors of the bakery, resigning herself to living like this for as long as it took to bring bread to her father and then getting back to the Real World.
Fragment of a Remembered Dream
It wasn't until she pressed her hand flat against my chest that I became aware of how heavily I was breathing. Her deep, slow breathing matched mine, in contrast with the still intensity of her stare. She leaned back against the front door of her apartment as she continued to hold her hand to my hard, keeping me from leaning forward. This was not an act of discouragement but rather a suspension of a moment. We savored the sense of a rollercoaster cresting the first hill and the anticipation of that first rush of speed. We could no more stop that first delirious plunge than we could leap over the moon, but we could stand on her porch and let the foretaste of the first inevitable plunge linger in our mouths.
Long Division v.2
Ed stared alternately at the receipt he’d recently pulled from his wallet and then at his cell phone. It was rally too early to call on this haze-filled Sunday morning. It felt oppressively muggy to Ed, sitting Indian-style on his bed, surrounded by a ginger tabby, a matte-black laptop, and the aforementioned receipt and cell phone. It wasn’t, he suspected, really humid at all, but lack of sleep and nerves always played hell with his body’s ability to adjust to the climate, even in his home town. Even on the best of days, Ed felt a little adrift. His joy came not from within, but from seeing delight reflected in some else’s eyes. That sounds very romantic, but in practice, it has its problems. He was alone now, except for the cat, and frequently at a loss for what to do. Or, rather, he could think of plenty to do but he had a difficult time with the question “Why?” His gaze went back and forth between the white slip of paper and the thick, black phone. He’d call after he played a game of solitaire and beat it. Or maybe he’d call after he checked the soccer results from six time zones away. Or perhaps after he...well, it didn’t matter. This was the game he played to distract himself from facing up to unpleasant tasks. In happier times, when he was only looking for a job, he’d become so good at manufacturing distractions and excuses that he could burn the entire day without ever having to do whatever he was avoiding. He was good at it. But in time, he’d become too aware of the man behind the curtain for the game to work in a satisfactory fashion. The red, LED-ish, digits on his bedside alarm clock read 9:46. He’d been awake for two hours without leaving the bed. He woke up, fired up the laptop, took a look at his wallet, and his heart stopped. It had a funny way of stopping, in that it felt like it was trying to burst from his chest via the shortest route available, ribs be damned. But stop it did. He could neither move, nor think, nor stop thinking. It was a stasis that a programmer might describe as an endless loop, He closed his eyes and simulated an uncountable number of responses to what had just happened, found none of them to be acceptable, and ran them all again. After an eternity, he looked to his right: 9:48. There was no point in avoiding it. He would be here until he made the call. Dawn wasn’t a natural morning. So, while she did routinely awaken before 8:00 on weekends, she hadn’t developed the routines that a native morning person would have to use those early hours when her past self would have still been cuddled up in the bedroom. Instead, unable to sleep despite, or perhaps because of, the gentle, nagging reminder that she’d had one margarita more than she ought the previous night, she popped open one of her laptops and caught up with her online world. She had just finished responding to the overnight traffic on her social networking sites and was about to dive into celebrity gossip and jump in the tub when her phone started to vibrate. She looked at the number and frowned slightly. She hadn’t spoken to Ed in weeks. She’d been slowly pruning their mutual networking connections, not entirely sure whose benefit she was doing it for, and she hadn’t seen him face to face in two months. Their contact had been limited to various forms of text in brief, awkward spasms that she suspected he felt compelled to draw out even though they obviously cost him dearly. Her feelings on the subject were, to say the last, complicated. She’d told him that it would be easier on her if she could hate him, which she realized was a curious thing to say to the person you’d just left. She knew she wasn’t very good at breaking up, but she was trying, and there are bound to be a few missed notes when you’re learning a new song. There was no evidence of Ed being online, so she suspected he probably wasn’t at home. They’d been playing a weird sort of hide and seek in the Yahoo chat. She’d appear online, he’d pop up, and then she’d suddenly disappear. It was awkward but, honestly, there wasn’t much they could do that wouldn’t be awkward. She was playing it by ear, trying to do her best and having no clear idea of what that meant. The point being: It was unusual that Ed would be calling. She picked up that phone and tried out her latest pleasant-but-emotionally-neutral greeting. “Yo.” “Hey you,” said Ed, also attempting a Swiss neutrality mixed with normality. If Dawn was struggling finding the right notes, Ed wasn’t even on the right page. “Sup? You sound like shit.” Dawn was deservedly well known for her lack of diplomacy with people who were close to her, but in this case, she was just stating a fact. Ed did sound like shit. “We need to talk.” “Ok, we’re talking.” “No, in person. We need to talk face-to-face.” “Ed, I don’t think that’s a good idea. It won’t do any good. I know you want to talk, but drawing it out like this won’t do either of us any good. We need to move on.” She only called him by his name when she was irritated, although she didn’t appear to be aware of this. “I don’t want to talk, but we need to talk. We need to talk face-to-face. I don’t care if we do it at your place, or my place, or some neutral ground.” “Why do we need to talk, Ed?” “Something happened last night. I haven’t told anyone else. I need to talk to you first.” “Ed, no. Just no. I’m not your girlfriend anymore. I’m not the person you need to be going to with your problems. You need to get past that.” Ed almost laughed. Maybe he did a little, but no phone yet invented would have picked up a sound that faint. “Babe, we need to talk. You know me. I wouldn’t ask if it weren’t important. You know that.” Dawn paused for a long time. She didn’t want to do this. She knew it was a bad idea and that this would just reopen some wounds that she imagined had been healing, although the damned things still felt pretty fresh. But he was right. He hadn’t asked before, even when he was at rock bottom. “Ok, Ed. Let’s meet at the Denny’s on 35. Can you give me an hour to get ready? I just woke up.” “No worries, and thank you.” “Would you like me to bring your stuff and your key?” “I don’t care. You don’t need to.” That last bit jarred Dawn more than a little. The two of them had a weird and prickly history with keys. She knew that the fact that she hadn’t returned his key any of the times she’d said she would was a sore subject with him. “Ok Ed, I’ll see you there at 11:00.” In the past, Dawn had always sought out impossible relationships. Nothing made Dawn more miserable than feeling trapped, so perhaps that was why she felt comfortable with situations that had an expiration date printed on the label. Ed was a virgin territory for her. Ed clearly saw her as a partner for life. She’d tried to think that way about him and even made it as far as looking picking out a ring. Perhaps a symbol of “forever” felt too much like a cage, because things were never as good again. When Dawn arrived, it looked as though Ed had been there since they hung up the phone. He was parked sideways on a booth, feet hanging off the edge, with his perpetually untied shoelaces brushing the formerly-colorful carpet. He smiled weakly but warmly at her, got up, and made a body movement that could have either indicated a hug or a handshake. Dawn made the call and gave him a quick but sincere hug and sat down. “Ed, you look like you sound.” “Sorry about that. Long night. Or long morning. You look lovely.” She did, in fact, look lovely. There was just enough pink in her cheeks to bring out her round, hazel eyes. Her hair hung in loose brown tendrils around her face and her lips shone with the glow that said “Burt’s Bee’s addict” to those who knew what to look for. She briefly thought about just putting her hair up and going. There was a slight worry that Ed might think that, if she dressed up, Ed might take that as a sign that she was still interested. She thought about it, though, and decided it was even more of a sign that she was over it if she didn’t take such things into consideration. Ed, on the other hand, looked miserable. She groaned a little bit inside. His eyes were watery and beseeching, although he did seem calm. Her “this was a bad idea” radar was fully engaged. Ed looked at her sideways and just said: “Well...” “What is it, Ed? What did you want to tell me?” She took pains to sound strong and direct and firm. She wasn’t good at it yet, but she was getting there. Ed looked down at his lap and mumbled something. Oh fuck, he was crying. The radar was flashing code red now. “What is it? I can’t hear you.” He looked up and, yes, he was crying. “I won the lottery, Dawn.” Dawn laughed a little. Not only was it a ridiculous thing to say, but people who win the lottery don’t cry. At last, they don’t cry like Ed was crying. His look wasn’t budging from miserable. “What do you mean, Ed?” “I won the lottery. Six out of six.” “How much?” she stalled, not sure where this was going but it seemed like a reasonable question. “Ten million.” It wasn’t a lot for winning the lottery, but it was a lot. “Holy fuck, Ed. You’re serious? You won the lottery?” “Mm hmm.” His look still didn’t say “I just won ten million dollars.” It said “Someone ran over my puppy.” “What the fuck? Ed. If you won the lottery, what the fuck? What’s so bad about winning the lottery?” At this point, her radar had completely shut down. The signal didn’t match any known pattern, so it just started flashing the internal-monologue-radar-metaphor version of “TILT.” Ed sighed and didn’t say anything. “Ed...?” “Fuck babe, I don’t know. I’m rich. Yay me. I can call and quit my job any time I want now. I can travel. Woo hoo...” he let it tail off. He wasn’t crying so much now, but his beseeching stare more than made up for it. Dawn was not completely stupid. “Oh...yeah,” “Yeah babe, it’s the sort of thing that Alanis would mistakenly call ‘ironic.’ O. Henry would do a better job with it, huh?” Dawn didn’t completely follow, but, as previously noted, she wasn’t completely stupid. Now she looked a little miserable. He might have ten million dollars, but was still Ed, and that was complicated. They’d had years and years to determine that it didn’t work. They weren’t in agreement as to why, or even whether or not it didn’t work for just her or for both of them (she’d made the mistake of saying ‘you’ll be better off without me’ to him a few times). But, the undeniable conclusion was, it hadn’t worked for her. Ed looked back down and spoke a little louder. “I want to pay off your student loans. All of ‘em.” “Ed, you don’t have to do that. You shouldn’t do that.” She meant it, too, but there might have been one lone voice in the back of her head that said “Is that all?” “No,” he paused, breathed in, and continued “ I do have to. There’s something else that I want to do but can’t. I understand that. Ok, I don’t understand it, but at least I accept it. Or, I, fuck, I don’t know, I get it at least.” The silence that followed would typically be described as awkward, but this was a silence that would make awkward silences blush and look away. There were probably other people in the restaurant. Neither of them would have been able to say for sure. “Ed...I can’t...I...” “I know babe. That time’s passed, and I can't buy that feeling back. It just makes me think of what we would have done, you know?” “Yeah, I do. I’m sorry.” “I know you are.” Ed hesitated. Every word had to be forced up and out of his throat, struggling to hold down the words he really wanted to say. “Just let me have the info on your loan. Or loans. Whatever.” “Yeah, ok. I’ll do that.” “And Dawn...?” The words he wanted to say were going to come out anyway. “If you ever change your mind. Ever. Just say the word and it's yours.” “I don’t...I’m sorry...I don’t feel that way about you anymore.” Dawn looked almost as miserable as Ed, and, as much as she would have been happy to have seen a way around it, her heart wasn’t budging. “I know. I know. But if you ever change you mind...I love you, and that’s not going to change.” And that was that. He’d said it, and it hadn’t changed anything, just like he knew it wouldn’t. But he also knew he couldn’t have kept from saying it. They hugged, sincerely, but without passion, and parted. Driving back home, Ed passed the Vespa store and decided to get on the road knowing it was going to be a long, long time before he could set foot in his home town again.
Bwains - first notes
Zombies.
Ok, let's think about this. Re-animated corpses. How's that gonna work? I'm going to assume the heart doesn't restart, so we're talking about strictly anaerobic movement of the muscles. We're going to consume fat and then muscle mass as we go. Whatever is driving this train is going to have a very short life span on each host body.
It's going to have to hijack the nervous system, isn't it? That will allow it to move the bits and pieces around. Will the muscles pull the energy from where they need it? I'll need to check that out. Otherwise we have to restart the heart, and I don't really want to do that. I want a very short duration. Sure, without the digestive system, we can probably get the same effect, but I'd rather not have the blood pumping. We'll see.
I want it to be sentient, whatever it is. A parasite that rides chordate nervous systems. Does it get to access the memories of the host? Dunno. Does it get the muscle memory and coordination? No! Zombie shamble, dammit. It might be pretty good at faking it, especially if it has to go from host to host quickly. It'll be pretty used to learning to drive a new car, as it were.
How does it move from host to host? Well....contact with, well, brains would be great. But I don't think so. I like the idea of disembodied entities, waiting to inhabit the dead host. I'm not sure if I can make that work, though. I made need some sort of physical transfer. One rule is hard and fast tho-they can't attach to a living nervous system. The host has to be dead for the transfer to take place.
So, how do they reproduce? I have no clue. Shelve that one for now.
Where do they come from? Well, fortunately, this is a sci-fi zombie story. Humans travel to another planet. Very earthlike (but not so much so that they can breathe the air...that's dumb...sorry, pet peeve), eerily so. I like the idea of everything looking so normal that the environment suits the humans have to wear will look really creepy. There's an ecosystem devoid of primates or any tool-using, sentient life. Alpha predators-fearsume buggers with all kinds of weapons at the top of the food chain. Rabbit-things. Herd critters. Largely familiar creatures. Don't describe ANY of them as being like any terrestrial creatures. Niven fucked up with the Kzin. Tiger-like became "tigers" in every reader's mind. Don't go there. Except for the rabbit-things. We want the association that comes with rabbits. Stupid, helpless, laughably harmless. Rabbits. Got it?
Only, there's something a little weird with the rabbit things. 90% of them are normal critters, doing their rabbit thing, basically being victimized by everything else in the food chain. Some of them, though...they're strange. They appear to have social structures far beyond those of typical prey animals. Rudimentary structures, strangely socialized behavior, high mortality rate (100% in fact, but we don't know that yet). We've only seen them from a great distance. They're not aware of the humans.
Humans being humans, they study the predators first. Duh. Shark week, you know? Fascinating, nasty bastards. Giant teeth, jaws like earthmovers. Scary. There's one that''s obviously old and/or infirm. As soon as its limp becomes noticible (I guess this things have to be somewhat social, like lions), the entire pack turn on it and rip it to utter shreds. They don't eat it (although the humans' first thought is 'cannibalism') , they just destroy it. Obviously, this is learned behavior. The big bastards know what happens when one of them dies, and they aren't taking any chances. To the humans, though, this is strange.
The oldest, and kindest of the humans, is fascinated by the rabbit things. They're dull to the others, so he spends his days watching them...alone. He befriends the rabbit things as he loses his strangeness to them and they lose their fear of him. He reads to them. Tells them stories. Until one day...
The other humans find the old man dead. He's been attacked, but by what, they don't know. This freaks them the hell out, but it gets worse. They prepare him for cremation (no burial on a new world, sorry), do their mourning, and, before they burn him, he stirs, staggers, and stands, saying:
"We need to talk."
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dammit. There's no way the humans aren't going to realize that the rabbit things are dead. The body temperature is going to give that away. Reptilian creatures maybe? Not quite what I wanted, but the lizard vibe could be useful here too. Cold-blooded rabbit things? Why the fur then? No, I'm afraid we're dealing with something that has a skin that doesn't preserve warmth. That'll work. Either that, or the parasite restarts the circulatory system. That means breathing. Well, I guess that makes talking easier, although it's funnier to just croak out whatever air fills the dead, still lungs.
I think this can work. A story to begin with the establishes the rules essentially in a vacuum, away from human society. The parasite obviously has to make its way back to earth. At that point, we have the vampire problem. That being: We need a rationale for these being not taking over the entire world in short order. What's to stop them from taking over the whole deal? The must reproduce very slowly, if at all. Or maybe earth is inhospitable to their reproductive cycle. That limits the total number of these parasites that can exist at once. Sure, they burn through bodies quickly (have to do some math on that one), but if the number is small enough, they're never going to take over. They'll be damned easy to detect, what with the body being dead and rapidly consuming itself, but...if they don't need physical contact to jump, then killing them is a bitch.
I'll think on this, sleep, and then revisit it and make a list of problems that need to be researched or explained.
Long Division - First Draft
This is a draft I knocked out on the airplane coming back from New York. The dialog doesn't really work and the POV is all over the place, but I was in an emotional place and I really wanted to write from that for the first draft. I hadn't originally envisioned this as a cycle, but, at least in this form, it appears to be heading that way. Curious...
Long Division
An Ed and Dawn Story
--------------------------
Ed stared alternately at the receipt he’d recently pulled from his wallet and his cell phone. It was rally too early to call on this hazy-filled Sunday morning. It felt oppressively muggy to Ed, sitting Indian-style on his bed, surrounded by a ginger tabby, a matte-black laptop, and the aforementioned receipt and cell phone. It wasn’t, he suspected, really humid at all, but lack of sleep and nerves always played hell with his body’s ability to adjust to the climate, even in his home town.
His gaze went back and forth between the white slip of paper and the thick, black phone. He’d called after he played a game of solitaire and beat it. Or maybe he’d call after he checked the soccer results from six time zones away. Or perhaps after he…well, it didn’t matter. This was the game he played to distract himself from facing up to unpleasant tasks. In happier times, when he was only looking for a job, he’d become so good at manufacturing distractions and excuses that he could burn the entire day without ever having to do whatever he was avoiding. He was good at it. But in time, he’d become too aware of the man behind the curtain for the game to work in a satisfactory fashion.
The red, LED-ish, digits on his bedside alarm clock read 9:46. He’d been awake for two hours without leaving the bed. He woke up, fired up the laptop, took a look at his wallet, and his heart stopped. It had a funny way of stopping, in that it felt like it was trying to burst from his chest via the shortest route available, ribs be damned. But stop it did. He could neither move, nor think, nor stop thinking. It was a stasis that a programmer might describe as an endless loop, He closed his eyes and simulated an uncountable number of responses to what had just happened, found none of them to be acceptable, and ran them all again. After an eternity, he looked to his right: 9:48.
There was no point in avoiding it. He would be here until he made the call.
Dawn hadn’t been a morning person for long so, while she did routinely awaken before 8:00 on weekends, she hadn’t developed the routines that a natural-born morning person would have to use those early hours when her past self would have still been cuddled up in the bedroom. Instead, unable to sleep despite, or perhaps because of, the gentle, nagging reminder that she’d had one margarita more than she ought the previous night, she popped open one of her laptops and caught up with her online world.
She had just finished responding to the overnight traffic on her social networking sites and was about to dive into celebrity gossip and jump in the tub when her phone started to vibrate. She looked at the number and frowned slightly. She hadn’t spoken to Ed in weeks. She’d been slowly pruning their mutual networking connections, not entirely sure whose benefit she was doing it for, and she hadn’t seen him face to face in two months. Their contact had been limited to various forms of text in brief, awkward spasms that she suspected he felt compelled to draw out even though they obviously cost him dearly.
Her feelings on the subject were, to say the last, complicated. She’d told him that it would be easier on her if she could hate him, which she realized was a curious thing to say to the person you’d just left. She knew she wasn’t very good at breaking up, but she was trying, and there are bound to be a few missed notes when you’re learning a new song.
There was no evidence of Ed being online, so she suspected he probably wasn’t at home. They’d been playing a weird sort of hide and seek in the Yahoo chat. She’d appear online, he’d pop up, and then she’d suddenly disappear. It was awkward but, honestly, there wasn’t much they could do that wouldn’t be awkward. She was playing it by ear, trying to do her best and having no clear idea of what that meant.
So, it was unusual that Ed would be calling.
She picked up that phone and tried out her latest pleasant-but-emotionally-neutral greeting.
“Yo.”
“Hey you,” said Ed, also attempting a Swiss neutrality mixed with normality. If Dawn was struggling finding the right notes, Ed wasn’t even on the right page.
“Sup? You sound like shit.” Dawn was deservedly well known for her lack of diplomacy with people who were close to her, but in this case, she was just stating a fact. Ed did sound like shit.
“We need to talk.”
“Ok, we’re talking.”
“No, in person. We need to talk face-to-face.”
“Ed, I don’t think that’s a good idea. It won’t do any good. I know you want to talk, but drawing it out like this won’t do either of us any good. We need to move on.” She only called him by his name when she was irritated, although she didn’t appear to be aware of this.
“I don’t want to talk, but we need to talk. We need to talk face-to-face. I don’t care if we do it at your place, or my place, or some neutral ground.”
“Why do we need to talk, Ed?”
“Something happened last night. I haven’t told anyone else. I need to talk to you first.”
“Ed, no. Just no. I’m not your girlfriend anymore, Ed. I’m not the person you need to be going to with your problems. You need to get past that.” Ed almost laughed. Maybe he did a little, but no phone yet invented would have picked up a sound that faint.
“Babe, we need to talk. You know me. I wouldn’t ask if it weren’t important. You know that.” Dawn paused for a long time. She didn’t want to do this. She knew it was a bad idea and that this would just reopen some wounds that she imagined had been healing, although the damned things still felt pretty fresh.
But he was right. He hadn’t asked before, even when he was at rock bottom.
“Ok, Ed. Let’s meet at the Denny’s on 35. Can you give me an hour to get ready? I just woke up.”
“No worries, and thank you.”
“Would you like me to bring your stuff and your key?”
“I don’t care. You don’t need to.” That last bit jarred Dawn more than a little. The two of them had a weird and prickly history with keys. She knew that the fact that she hadn’t returned his key any of the times she’d said she would was a sore subject with him.
“Ok Ed, I’ll see you there at 11:00.”
When Dawn arrived, it looked as though Ed had been there since they hung up the phone. He was parked sideways on a booth, feet hanging off the edge, with his perpetually untied shoelaces brushing the formerly-colorful carpet. He smiled weakly but warmly at her, got up, and made a body movement that could have either indicated a hug or a handshake. Dawn made the call and gave him a quick but sincere hug and sat down.
“Ed, you look like you sound.”
“Sorry about that. Long night. Or long morning. You look lovely.” She did, in fact, look lovely. There was just enough pink in her cheeks to bring out her round, hazel eyes. Her hair hung in loose brown tendrils around her face and her lips shone with the glow that said “Burt’s Bee’s addict” to those who knew what to look for. She briefly thought about just putting her hair up and going. There was a slight worry that Ed might think that, if she dressed up, Ed might take that as A Sign that she was still interested. She thought about it, though, and decided it was even more of a sign that she was Over It if she didn’t take such things into consideration.
Ed, on the other hand, looked miserable. She groaned a little bit inside. His eyes were watery and beseeching, although he did seem calm. Her “this was a bad idea” radar was fully engaged. Ed looked at her sideways and just said:
“Well…”
“What is it, Ed? What did you want to tell me?” She took pains to sound strong and direct and firm. She wasn’t good at it yet, but she was getting there. Ed looked down at his lap and mumbled something. Oh fuck, he was crying. The radar was flashing code red now.
“What is it? I can’t hear you.” He looked up and, yes, he was crying.
“I won the lottery, Dawn.”
Dawn laughed a little. Not only was it a ridiculous thing to say, but people who win the lottery don’t cry. At last, they don’t cry like Ed was crying. His look wasn’t budging from miserable.
“What do you mean, Ed?”
“I won the lottery. Six out of six, babe.”
“How much?” she stalled, not sure where this was going but it seemed like a reasonable question.
“Ten million.” It wasn’t a lot for winning the lottery, but it was a lot.
“Holy fuck, Ed. You’re serious? You won the lottery?”
“Mm hmm.” His look still didn’t say “I just won ten million dollars.” It said “Someone ran over my puppy.”
“What the fuck? Ed. If you won the lottery, what the fuck? What’s so bad about winning the lottery?” At this point, her radar had completely shut down. The signal didn’t match any known pattern, so it just started flashing the internal-monologue-radar-metaphor version of “TILT.”
Ed sighed and didn’t say anything.
“Ed…?”
“Fuck babe, I don’t know. I’m rich. Yay me. I can call and quit my job any time I want now. I can travel. Woo hoo...” he let it tail off. He wasn’t crying so much now, but his beseeching stare more than made up for it.
Dawn was not completely stupid.
“Oh…yeah,”
“Yeah babe, it’s the sort of thing that Alanis would mistakenly call ‘ironic.’ O. Henry would do a better job with it, huh?” Dawn didn’t completely follow, but, as previously noted, she wasn’t completely stupid.
Now she looked a little miserable. He might have ten million dollars, but was still Ed, and that was complicated. They’d had years and years to determine that it didn’t work. They weren’t in agreement as to why, or even whether or not it didn’t work for just her or for both of them (she’d made the mistake of saying ‘you’ll be better off without me’ to him a few times). But, the undeniable conclusion was, it hadn’t worked. Ed looked back down and spoke a little louder.
“I want to pay off your student loans. All of ‘em.”
“Ed, you don’t have to do that. You shouldn’t do that.” She meant it, too, but there might have been one lone voice in the back of her head that said “Is that all?”
“No babe, I do have to. There’s something else that I want to do but can’t. I understand that. Ok, I don’t understand it, but at least I accept it. Or, I, fuck, I don’t know, I get it at least.”
The silence that followed would typically be described as awkward, but this was a silence that would make awkward silences blush and look away. There were probably other people in the restaurant. Neither of them would have been able to say for sure.
“Ed…I can’t…I…”
“I know babe. That time’s passed, and I can't buy that feeling back. It just makes me think of what we would have done, you know?”
“Yeah, I do. I’m sorry.”
“I know you are babe.” Ed paused. Every word had to be forced up and out of his throat, struggling to hold down the words he really wanted to say. “Just let me have the info on your loan. Or loans. Whatever.”
“Yeah, ok. I’ll do that.”
“And babe…” he paused again. The words he wanted to say were going to come out anyway. “If you ever change your mind. Ever. Just say the word and it's yours.”
“I don’t…I’m sorry…I don’t feel that way about you anymore.” Dawn looked almost as miserable as Ed, and, as much as she would have been happy to have seen a way around it, her heart wasn’t budging.
“I know. I know babe. But if you ever change you mind…I love you, and that’s not going to change.”
And that was that. He’d said it, and it hadn’t changed anything, just like he knew it wouldn’t. But he also knew he couldn’t have kept from saying it.
They hugged, sincerely, but without passion, and parted. Driving back home, Ed passed the Vespa store and decided to get on the road knowing it was going to be a long, long time before he could set foot in his home town again.
Funeral for a Friend
It was here, four years ago, that we stopped being friends.
We'd met a couple years prior to that night, but we'd just been friends. You were involved and I was trying quixotically to get involved with a doe-eyed girl who wasn't having it. We'd only seen each other a couple of times, keeping in touch over the phone or with e-mail.
That all changed, four years ago tonight. You were in town for a school contest, staying in a cheap hotel with what looked like a dozen of your classmates. We met up and headed down to my favorite bar for a few beers and the best burgers this town has to offer.
That night, at the end of the bar, we stopped being friends.
I can't say I wasn't hoping for just that. I'd been seeing a girl, a perfectly nice girl, but just a girl, you know? When I heard you were going to be in town, that was the end of that. She deserved better, but she wasn't going to get it from me. I just wanted to make sure there weren't any loose ends, just in case. I'm weird about that. I don't believe that anything that starts badly can work out in the long run. You know me: I'm all about the long run.
After that night we stopped being friends, we saw each other as often as four and a half hours distance would allow. That's quite a lot if you want it to be, and we both did. You bravely changed the course you'd mapped out for your life and moved here to be with me. And stayed.
Nothing's perfect, and not everything that's good lasts. We were really good for three years or so, but the last year was tough. I don't understand what happened, but it doesn't really matter whether I do or don't. You didn't want to be with me anymore, and that's all that needs to be said.
So tonight, I walked into that same bar. Four years to the day from when we stopped being friends. Three weeks to the day from when you left me. Funny-it's not the same bar. Not really. There's no smoke to hide how tawdry the place looks when the daylight sneaks in. The food is no longer worthy of the reputation. And the end of the bar, where the two of us stopped being friends, is nothing more than the end of the bar.
Mood song
This song very much captures the mood I want for the second half of the story. It is joyful and sincere and maudlin and always just on the verge of bursting in to the ecstatic. It is the sort of song I'd love to have for the first dance at my wedding. It is "Go Places" by the New Pornographers - WTF
Yes a heart will always go one step too far
Come the morning and the four corners I see
What the moral of the back story could be
Come with me, go places
And a heart will always stay one day too long
Always hoping for the hot flashes to come
For the glue to dry on our new creation
Come with me, go places
Come head on, full circle
Our arms fill with miracles
Play hearts, kid, they work well
Like classics play aces
Stay with me, go places
Once more for the ages
Yes a heart should always go one step too far
Come the morning and the day winding like dreams
Come the morning every blue shade of green
Come with me, go places
Come head-on, full circle
Our arms fill with miracles
Play hearts, kid, they work well
Like magic, play aces
Stay with me, go places
Once more for the ages
Come one now, come all ye
This story breaks free here
Tales from the back pages
From somewhere, Encida
Deus ex machina
Good morning, Chrstina
Come head on, full circle
Our path blocked but sure we'll
Make records, then set them
Make copies, win races
Stay with me, go places
Once more for the ages
Backstory - Ed's Death
This short story isn't really a story at all-it's the backstory for the story. It's sort of a warmup exercise to give me an idea of the story arc and thems that I'm working on. -WTF
Ed always knew how he would die. When he was very young, too young to make letters, he was angry at his parents and he drew a picture of them on a napkin and then angrily crossed them out with thick strokes of black crayon. Looking at what he’d done, he imagined his parents being gone. He imagined the hole that their absence would leave, and he felt a terrible pain and began to cry. He remembered this event for the rest of his life, knowing he would eventually die of a broken heart.
Surely, there were other things that might have ended his story prematurely. Ed thought of himself as a bit of a risk-taker (and who doesn’t?), but in truth, he was fairly cautious in how he lived his live. He didn’t drink much or smoke at all, and he avoided drugs because he was afraid he might like them. He ate too much, and he wasn’t the most attentive driver in the world, but, in looking at him, you wouldn’t see anything that would suggest an abbreviated lifespan.
There were times in Ed’s life when he was rich with love, and he felt it was like walking through an oasis, abundant and full of joy. Sometimes he would walk this path alone, but more often than not, he had a partner to share these times. He was always happiest getting to share these green times with someone, to see the beauty and wonder reflected in their eyes and back off of his own. When his life was full of love, Ed’s road was easy.
For every oasis, though, there was a desert. The road was hard, and it could easily turn two people against each other. Sometimes, one or the other would decide that this road was not one they wanted to walk, and they would turn away. Sometimes it was Ed who would choose to turn away, but most of the time it was not. When in the desert, love had to be nurtured and protected and fought for as though one’s life depended on it, or it would die. Most often, Ed walked the desert by himself.
For some people, the desert wasn’t so bad. They scarcely noticed that love was absent, because they had other things on their mind and moved on. For Ed, the desert was brutal. The desert was no place of self-discovery for him because he knew who he was. The thing that moved him to cross the desert was the very thing that was absent there. Because of this, the trek became harder for him as he grew older. He knew he had to cross the desert, but he had more and more difficulty convincing himself why.
It was great fortune, then, that he met Dawn. There were innumerable things that he loved about Dawn: Her quirky smile, her evil sense of humor, her great capacity for caring while at the same time sharing Ed’s less-than-social tendencies. The list could go until all the world’s ink was spent and the list would still truly capture why he loved her. However, no matter what form the list took, one item would surely be underlined: She would cross the desert with him.
Ed and Dawn made many journeys across the desert together. The crossings weren’t ever easy. Their love was tried and, at times, found wanting. They fought, they cried, they separated, they reconciled. Ed would have been hard-pressed to explain exactly why they made it. There was no magic to it. The desert is where the magic doesn’t work. Dawn just fought harder, and loved harder, than anyone Ed had ever encountered.
Shortly after Ed’s 88th birthday, Dawn passed away. She was incapable of doing anything she didn’t care about, and when she did care, she gave everything she had. Eventually, that took its toll. She had never looked forward to being old anyway. She’d led a marvelous life full of adventures that you never would have imagined someone with her background might have known. At least, you would never have imagined it if you had never met her. Those who had knew better.
So once again, the desert lay in front of Ed. There was nothing but sand and sun as far as his eyes could see. He knew that, eventually, he would find another oasis if he forced himself to make the trek. “Not this time,” he thought to himself. One last night, he put himself to bed in his now-empty house and closed his eyes. It was with great relief that he lay down and let the desert claim him at last.
