BTW: The photo art and prose included in any given post are separate creations having nothing to do with each other. Duality and such …

* * *

Late Summer Eggs

“Yeah,” the manager told him, “We’re not doing that anymore.”

The farmer looked at him like the sky had fallen. “Since when?”

“Since now. Also, you’ll note our pricings have changed,” the manager pointed to the big board.

The farmer gripped his clipboard with his perfectly filled out forms on it, pen at the top if he needed to add or change anything. In his truck outside were 24 dozen eggs carefully collected that morning by his family from their 350 layers. The big board listed the price per egg at one-third less than they had been three days ago. The manager of the co-op watched him, half on edge as if expecting another argument and half weary from already having had too many.

The farmer said, “These eggs are from free-range, hormone and antibiotic free layers fed verified and expensive non-GMO grains, and the eggs themselves go into containers with my family’s picture on it that enables the stores that sell them in their organic sections and correctly identify where the eggs came from and who humanely raised and cared for the chickens as an American farming family.”

“Yes, well, you know the co-op has been sold and the new corporate guys don’t do things that way. Everybody’s eggs go into the same inventory and generic containers and they’re able to sell more of them for much less,” the manager said, practiced.

“Everybody,” the farmer was nearly shouting, “includes the big corporate farms that can afford to sell for much less!”

The manager said patiently, clearly tired of being patient, “Consumers just didn’t go for the higher-priced, family-farm eggs; they’d rather buy a cheap egg marked ‘organic’ even if in the back of their minds they know the ‘organic’ part is bullshit. After all, the co-op was sold because it was losing money.”

The farmer stared at him. The manager asked, “Still want to sell your eggs?”

“What choice do I have?” The farmer would have to arrange a new delivery schedule with a different co-op, if he could find one, likely much farther away, and he hadn’t done that. The hand holding the clipboard fell to his side. “So you don’t need my forms?”

“There’s another form, now, that my people fill out just to get an accurate count and we give you a copy,” the manager said. “With a check, of course.”

Uh-huh, the farmer thought, a check for a lot less.

He watched the workers carefully unload and verify the number of eggs, impassive faces that were aware and sympathetic of the trauma farmers like he faced, but who had seen much worse. Had been driven to cross deserts and endure prejudice and work at the lowest end of the food chain because things where they started were even worse. He preferred not to think about that.

As he drove home he crunched the numbers. One-third less per egg meant his family needed one-third more layers to make up the difference, but more layers meant more overhead, so realistically they would have to double their chickens. To accommodate that they would also need larger facilities, which meant their debt structure would also increase if they could get the bank to go along with it, which meant they would need even more chickens. By then, the operation’s size would surpass his family’s ability to run it, so they would need to hire people. And so on.

He drove home through a canyon of corn fields, so tall and majestic in the late summer sun the road seemed to have cowered. He recalled the offers they’d received to sell out to the corporate interests; sell the land and everything. Be allowed to live there but to no longer be a family farm, just a family of agricultural workers conducting industrialized food production. He thought of the politicians seductively calling for a return to an earlier America even as they facilitated exactly what was happening, and his neighbors would vote for them, and it would happen even faster. He thought, as he drove home and as the corn canyon walls seemed to squeeze the road into an even narrower straight line, straight and flat through a landscape both familiar and alien, that he’d been on this course all his life, squeezed between forces out of his control, no room to turn around even if he could, only the occasional unattractive crossroad. No choice but to keep moving, stay the course, and find himself once more with his family, on land his ancestors had farmed for a century and a half. They would kick the dirt and maybe even curse, but they would come up with a plan to keep their world together. But, the despondent mood he was in, he knew it wouldn’t work. Whatever band-aid they came up with now, the glacier would keep melting, a little bit more every year. And he believed in his heart the life his grandfather knew, the life his father sort of knew and raised him to embrace, would, eventually, during his lifetime or his sons’, vanish.

He also knew the road itself would not stop; something would come next. They would keep moving. But he was so in love with what they had already passed.
 
- CH

BTW: The photo art and prose included in any given post are separate creations having nothing to do with each other. Duality and such …

* * *

Crossroads

The older man touched the younger one on the shoulder and shook him just slightly, just enough to bring him out of a shallow dream, just enough that his eyes jerked open. He said to him, “You wants to learn the guitar or not?”

The younger one nodded a couple times, wide-eyed.

“C’mon, then,” the older man told him, “It’s almost Midnight.”

They crept lightly from the shack, guitars strapped to their backs, past five sharecroppers in two rooms, sacked out, breathing deeply, or snoring softly, except one. Young Loretha, the one the younger man was wooing against her mama’s wishes, awake in the corner, watched them leave, the whites of her eyes seeming to glow in the dark, the younger man looking back at her, feeling guilty, but not stopping. There would be no stopping. Could be no stopping. By then, his determination had joined his consciousness awake. He would not be denied what he wanted, even by a woman.

They walked the dirt path between the half dozen other shacks, only a crescent moon and the stars to light their way. Past the shacks a few yards it crossed with another dirt path; straight ahead went to the fields, right went to the plantation houses. They went left, into the woods.

Left, fifty yards or so, to the cemetery.

The older man paused at the big oak tree that marked the entry into the little plot, listening intently. Not a sound. Even the insects were reverent. “Right Midnight,” he said. “Perfect”. Old and new tombstones sprinkled over the plot in only vaguely organized rows, some catching bits of starlight in their flakes and ridges, some so dim they looked like holes in the ground. The older man smiled back at the younger one, his white teeth bright against the dark. “Now the haints be comin’ out.” He moved between the stones and chose a couple way to the back, low for sitting, where they could face each other. They unslung their guitars, cradled them, strumming, and tuning with delicate caresses. The older man said, “This ain’t no devil stuff we’re doin’.”

The younger man said, “I know.”

“Listen to how quiet it is.”

The younger man nodded, large, trusting eyes.

“We tries to practice anywheres else, people come bothering us, sayin’ ‘play us this, play us that’. Ain’t no one gwon bother with us here.”

The younger man said, “I cain’t hardly see what I’m doin’.”

“Ain’t s’pose to see, that’s part of what I be teaching you. Got to feel that guitar like it’s part of y’all. Got to hear what your fingers touch.”

The younger man nodded. This was why he liked the older man and why, as he had drifted like dandelion into him, he clung to him now like burr against his pants cuffs. The older man was the best guitar player he had ever heard, shockingly better than he was and he had thought he was good. He would suck up everything he could learn from him like a kitten lapping milk. Everything the older man told him was like a language he knew but couldn’t quite access himself. A key to a universe within.

“Now play me something,” the older man said, and the younger one began strumming the Blind Lemon Jefferson song Loretha liked; he only needed to hear a tune once and he could recreate it on guitar. The older man taught him to apply a damping effect on the bass strings to create a rhythm. He showed him how a piano turnaround at the end of a normal twelve bars of music sounded more polished than simply returning to the starting chord of the standard twelve bars. He taught him to tune his guitar one fret lower when using open tuning, and to tune the second fret to match his singing voice. He taught him a high-note triplet riff to increase the drama in boogie patterns. A special trick: he showed him how to tune his low strings lower and his high strings higher, creating chords no one else had heard before. He showed him how to play bass, melody, and chords all at the same time making it sound as though two musicians and two guitars were playing. Tuning strategies and fingering techniques that enabled him to play the guitar like playing a piano, a skill so many guitarists had tried and failed to master. The guitar began to feel like a new creature completely in his power, and himself like a new man imbued with infinite control. Hours past, and as they grew weary the older man, looking approvingly, said, “Now all you be needing is more of this cemetery practice. That, and a little more confidence.”

They left the plot before the sun could rise, in the darkest part of the night, the haints whispering with the wind in the trees. “You head back near Memphis to that juke you play at, to those old musicians called you ‘kid’, think what they say now,” The older man said.

“I suspect they will say,” the younger man smiled, “They will say I met the Devil at the Crossroads.”

They moved along the dirt path a minute in silence, barely able to see through the darkness. The older man asked, “But you didn’t see no Devil, did you?”

The young man said, “Nope.”

“But you did pass a crossroads of sorts tonight, and they’s be too afraid to go near it,” the older man chuckled. “You just let ‘em think it.”

- CH

BTW: The photo art and prose included in any given post are separate creations having nothing to do with each other. Duality and such …

* * *

Custodial Arts

“Morning, lover,” she said right in his face as he cracked, with great difficulty and an aching head, eyelids open. It took him a few seconds, but only a few, to remember her huge brown eyes. Kissing in the parking lot outside the bar. Then … what had happened? She pulled away now, smirking. She was still wearing the light lemon chiffon top he remembered. She stood, said, “I’m going to go slip into something more appropriate.” And when he tried to answer her he realized he couldn’t.

He took a deep breath trying to wake up.. His mouth felt as dry as sandpaper. He coughed a little; moaned a little. Opened his mouth and then understood – he was gagged. He tried to reach to his face and discovered his arms were tied stretched out along the chair to which he was tightly bound. He tried to call out, terror rising, breaths coming faster. Where the hell was he? Looked and smelled like a dim, musty basement. Minutes passed before he heard sounds, a creaky wheel, and she came around the dark corner looking quite different, hair tightly pulled back, face colorless, pushing a janitor’s cart and wearing work clothes. “Hi, lover,” she smiled.

He tried to scream through his gag, yanked uselessly at his bounds. “Oh, you might as well settle in. We’ve got work to do!”

He whimpered. His eyes pleading with her.

“What’s that?” she asked. “Well, of course I look different! I can’t have the kids seeing me in those clothes with all that makeup on. What would they think! Silly!

“I’m the custodian, you know, at St. Canisius Elementary School.”

His eyes went wide at her.

“Uh-huh,” she said, “That one. The very one.

“You know, not so long ago, we had to close for a while. Before we reopened, I had to go in and clean it. Let me tell you, after being closed for a couple months that place was dirty! Oh my! I like to use this cleaner here on the floor and walls,” she picked up a gallon jug filled with pink liquid, “Because it gets the dirt up but it’s mild and smells pleasant.” She unscrewed the cap and held it under his nose; it had a kind of vanilla lavender scent. “Of course, the school was so dirty I had to go over the floors three times before I was satisfied. But then, you know, I came to the places where the blood had pooled.”

His rapid breathing had slowed, now, to almost nothing.

“Actually, it was the police who told me the only way to get up the blood and brains and tiny skull fragments was a mixture of bleach with hydrogen peroxide. They even gave me a sheet of paper with the exact formula on it,” she held up another gallon jug, this one filled with a blue liquid. “This formula right here. It’s much harsher.” She unscrewed the cap, brought it to his nose, and the stench nearly knocked him unconscious. The vapors seemed to invade every nook of his sinuses. He closed his eyes tightly as they burned. “See?” She took the jug away, placed it carefully back on her cart. Then she sat carefully on his lap, arms around his neck, nose almost touching his.

“I tried just using the mop, lover,” she said softly. “Tried a couple times but it just wasn’t coming up. Even with that nasty smelling stuff I had to get onto my hands and knees and scrub for all I was worth. They said I got it all. Everybody was complementary and thanked me for working so hard.” Her voice was almost whispering now. “Thing is, I still kept seeing blood everywhere. Every time I came around a corner I thought I saw another stain. Every time I closed my eyes. Every single time I tried to sleep; I’d see it. The stains were everywhere. Freaked me out!”

She slid from his lap, went to the cart. “After a while, they sent me to a nice hospital they said would help me remove all the stains. After a few months I told everybody it had, but I lied. I kept thinking, ‘what is causing these stains?’ Well, on the surface, of course, the guns. But the guns didn’t walk in there on their own, did they? It was that guy who brought in a duffle bag of them and started pulling the triggers. But the police killed him, right? That should have taken care of the stains, right? But it didn’t. So then I thought, ‘where did the guy, who was clearly unstable, get the guns?’”

She gasped, smiled broadly at him. “It was you! You’re the guy who sponsored that big gun show and fixed it so nobody had to follow basic background checks or laws of any kind when people bought and sold guns and that’s where all this guy’s weapons came from! You’re the stain!”

She turned to the cart and opened a small black case. “Well, you and I both know, I could scrub you with this blue stuff all day long and it would probably sting like hell, but it won’t change anything. Humans aren’t like tile floors; every surface requires a different technique.” From the black case she retrieved a syringe and a needle. She screwed the needle into the syringe, dipped the tip into the blue solution. “Thing is, lover, before I applied myself to the custodial arts, I was studying to be a nurse. Yes, I had some of the same issues with the sight of blood, so it became clear that advocation wasn’t for me. But as it happened,” she turned to him, holding the filled syringe in the air, drop of liquid clinging to the tip of the needle, “I knew how to hit a vein.

“I believe this will do the trick.”

- CH

* * *

BTW: The photo art and prose included in any given post are separate creations having nothing to do with each other. Duality and such …

* * *

The Pie Hour

Three A.M. hour was her most serene. Not a lot of traffic and pretty much the same people came in regular; couple of sheriff’s deputies and a highway patrolman, truckers or travelers off the adjacent state highway who were trying to avoid the interstate or get to it, a few locals who just seemed regularly up at that hour. But this guy was different.

He came in wearing a big Aussie style cowboy hat and a wide grin, twinkling eyes that pierced right through her. He stepped up and sat at the counter, paying no mind to anyone else, and said happily, “Hey there.” Only a half dozen people were scattered across the diner and all of them looked up at him. The patrolman and the deputy seated together over coffee and pie checked him against the list of suspicions in their head. But nobody took the wide-eyed interest the Old Man did.

She picked up the coffee carafe and a cup and saucer and stepped towards him. “Hi,” she said.

“You read my mind,” he said, nodding at the coffee as she sat the cup down and poured into it.

“Not hard to do,” she said, pleasant but not too friendly.

He sipped. “You make it good and strong,” he approved.

“The owner’s idea,” she smiled, though she was the one that made it that way. She made it almost twice as strong as he’d taught her to when she started a dozen years ago. “Cream or sugar?”

“You read my mind again,” he beamed and called her by her first name, which she guessed he’d read on her name tag.

“Anything to eat?” Kid back by the griddle, only other employee, was paying attention as he scraped off a cheeseburger.

“Got pie?” he asked.

“Pie’s our main thing,” she said, and she wasn’t exaggerating. The menu shrank to cheeseburgers, fries, a few other sandwiches overnight, but it was usually pie people wanted. The owner always ordered three fresh ones be brought in late evening by the Mennonite lady who baked them: two fruit and one cream pie.

“God peach?”

“Just sold the last one,” she said, and a little higher came the chin of the Old Man, alone in a booth against the big windows, who’d bit into the last slice just minutes earlier.

“Well, heck fire.”

“Got strawberry and banana cream.”

“We’ll make do with strawberry, then.”

The Old Man, she noticed, hadn’t stopped watching them. He always seemed to study people when they came in, but as she moved to the glass case and carefully removed a slice from its round pan onto a plate it occurred to her how uncharacteristically alert his attention was. The Old Man had started showing up, oh, four or five years ago, she thought. Nearly every night, somewhere between 2:45 and 3:30 he’d show, walking down from the ramshackle houses on the rise back behind the diner. Couldn’t sleep, he’d told her once. Never seemed to want to talk to anybody; sat and sipped coffee and picked at a pie until close to 5a before stiffly making his way back up the rise.

“Haven’t seen you around before,” she said to the guy. It was by experience she’d learned not to ask questions like ‘where are you from’ or ‘where you headed’ because people sometimes just turned evasive. Statements were more benign. If people wanted to volunteer information after that it usually flowed freely.

But he said, “Really? Thought you might have seen me by now. I’ve been around,” he grinned as he forked the tip from the slice of pie into his mouth. “Mmmmmmm! Darn good!”

That told her nothing. She left him alone as he ate. Noticed that the patrolman wasn’t particularly interested, and he and the deputy were just shootin’ the bull now. The trucker clearly needed more coffee and she picked up the carafe and went to fill his cup. One of the three travelers needed a refill too. By the time she got back behind the counter the guy was finishing his pie and gulping the rest of his coffee.

“Hit the spot, perfect!” he declared as he swept a napkin across his mouth. She smiled at him. He said, “Shame I hadn’t time to get here before.”

“Well,” she said, “You know where to find us now. We’re always open.”

“Well, sure!” he said, and she thought he started to say something else, but stopped himself. He seemed to pause, tossed a few bills onto the counter, then got up from his stool and turned to the Old Man as though he’d known he was there all along. “You ready, my friend?”

The Old Man didn’t seem the least bit surprised. She was, and her mouth came open a little. The Old Man said, “I’ve been ready.”

“Let’s hit it, then,” the guy said.

The Old Man awkwardly pulled himself out of his booth, his back not quite straightening up and his knees not quite bending as they should, nor bearing the weight of his long life as he tried to move through just a little more of it. The guy very tenderly took one of his elbows and helped him, a gentle picture of care. As they moved slowly out the door, the guy smiled back at her and said, “Thanks! Be seeing you!”

She’d started to nod, but they were gone by then. She watched through the window as they moved behind the parked semi, then disappeared. And never returned.
 
- CH

BTW: The photo art and prose included in any given post are separate creations having nothing to do with each other. Duality and such …

* * *

Torment

The meeting so annoyingly interrupted was penultimate to the release of the wildly anticipated new product certain to make them both renowned and rich. Surely among the most important events in modern history. Every painstaking attention to detail had to be perfect prior to release. The team huddled together, he right in the middle of it, concentrating so hard under the florescent lights and on such little sleep he had a headache, which he ignored. Now this! Right at a critical point! His secretary tried to be discreet as she cracked the door and silently extended her right hand with the pinky and thumb out to indicate a phone call, but once she got his attention she got everybody else’s along with it.

“Take a message,” he told her.

“It’s an emergency,” she said sternly, forcefully, almost as an order, reflecting the company’s philosophy that ‘secretaries rule the world’ and hired only those capable of taking charge.

He sighed. Somebody said, “We need a break anyway.”

“Some of this will take until tomorrow at least,” somebody else said.

He signed again. “Fine,” then, because he was team leader, “We’ll reconvene at eight-thirty tomorrow.” As they filed out he gave his secretary the ‘what-the-hell’ look, to which she gave him the ‘pull-your-head-out-of-your-ass’ look back.

“There’s a problem with your father,” she told him. “Line three.”

It was that nurse at the assisted living facility again. Had to admit she sounded more frantic than usual. “Okay, I’ll be right over.”

The nice thing about driving at this time of day was that traffic was lighter. The bad thing, he cursed, is that what traffic was out was slower. Much slower. He weaved and diced his German sports sedan in and out and between the other vehicles like a bat shooting itself at insects and made the trip in 35 minutes. He found his dad poised in front of his easel, brush in hand, glaring at a painting already judiciously illustrated. The nurse pulled him back up the hall.

“He’s been like that for three days,” she said. “He hasn’t eaten, hasn’t slept, or if he has he did it standing up. This morning we found he had soiled himself and he fought and cussed us as we got him changed and cleaned up.”

“He’s just been standing there like that?”

“Once in a while he seems to dab at something, but, yeah, just like that.”

He went slowly into his dad’s room and around where he could see him. Still took several seconds before his dad noticed him, and when he did he said in his most annoyed tone, “Oh, Jesus Fucking Christ, they called your ass, didn’t they?”

“Uh-huh. They’re worried.”

“They’re mother hens! I haven’t been working that long.”

“You’ve been here for three days, and you haven’t eaten, and you haven’t slept, and this morning you shit your pants.”

He looked directly at his son for the first time, a little disbelieving but acknowledging it was probably true. The nurse appeared in the doorway, holding a food tray. “Well, good god damn it!” he said angrily, wiped his brush and put it and his palette down and moved stiffly towards the little table next to the window. “Bring it here, then,” he barked at the nurse and she placed the tray in front of him. It looked like chicken noodle soup, a cheese sandwich, and orange Jell-o. “Jesus,” his dad shook his head at it. “I’d like to order crawfish etouffee with key lime pie instead.”

The nurse said, “We don’t serve that.” Then added, “And you know it.”

“Get the hell out of here and let me eat.”

He sat down opposite his dad and told the nurse, “I’ll stay with him for a while,” so she’d leave them.

“God damned interruptions,” his dad cursed, but picked up the spoon and slurped the soup.

“Yeah,” he said, “Speaking of interruptions, I didn’t exactly have time for this. I’m in the middle of creating something new myself. Something important. Something that will matter to a lot of people.”

His dad snorted. “Will it be obsolete by this time next year?”

He thought of the ‘update’ planning meetings already on his calendar to follow the launch. Shoot, he thought, it will be obsolete in three months and updates would start rolling out a couple months after that. “Maybe,” he hedged.

His dad, ladling the soup down rather rapidly now, pointed at the painting with his spoon,. “That won’t be,” he said.

The painting seemed to be an abstract portrait of a woman; he didn’t recognize the subject. The paint flowed in long, vibrant ribbons from the top. His dad had used long, thick brush strokes to apply the paint; the texture broke the illusion that it had been pulled down by gravity. Instead, it almost looked like it had been applied by a shotgun, then smeared or allowed to drip. Vibrant colors edged in contrasting pastels. He had to admit, he found it compelling.

His dad said with his mouth full, “People will be studying my art long after that ‘product’ of yours has been replaced ten times over, so don’t talk to me about interruptions.” By now the soup was gone and he had moved on to the sandwich. “I guess I was hungrier than I thought.”

He asked his dad, “What do you call this painting?”

His dad replied, “Torment.” Then added, “I may change it to ‘Annoyance’.” Finally he gulped up the Jell-o and looked at the tray as if surveying for another morsel. For the first time, his dad looked tired to him, his concentration broken.

“Why don’t you lay down for a minute.”

His dad nodded and lay awkwardly on the bed. He covered him with a blanket. “Just for a bit,” his dad said, but in short order he had fallen fast asleep.

He sat with him for another 20 minutes before rising and moving towards the door, pausing to study the painting again. He found himself hoping his dad could finish it.

- CH

* * *

BTW: The photo art and prose included in any given post are separate creations having nothing to do with each other. Duality and such …

* * *

Electric Bliss

When the Event ended she retreated to the observatory’s small breakroom a couple hours later than she normally would have. Quarter-to-four in the morning; the Event had postponed things, and now her belly was rumbling, though she didn’t mind it. She should have minded it, she thought, and she shouldn’t even be hungry. She should be crying. She should be terrified. She should be on the computer, on the phone, screaming to every other astronomer she could think of, trying to get the word out, trying to find out who else had seen it, trying to get confirmation. Instead, she calmly opened the little plastic container with her salad in it and began crunching on a slice of radish laying on top, dabbed with the French dressing she loved. Rather than despair, the warm, calm, lovely glow that had enveloped her these past few days would not be dissuaded.

Why should it, she thought, pulling a saltine from a sandwich bag, scraping a little salad onto it with her fork, crunching away as she looked at the bare walls. There were no windows in the breakroom as it was deep in the observatory’s interior. The cork bulletin board was crowded with announcements and staff schedules, according to which another astronomer was generally with her for the shift, but he’d awakened with a sore throat and decided to stay home. There was a maintenance guy puttering around somewhere; they’d rarely said three words at a time to each other. There was a tech person on call, but only for real emergencies. That was all the little campus-based observatory had funding for, and only that much because her study of Wolf-Rayet stars, in particular Eta Carinae. drew enough science foundation money to pay for observations at this time. She considered her solitude and concluded it was perfect. Other people at this moment would only disturb her mellow. She took another small bite of salad, put the fork down, and absently rubbed her abdomen where right that second, right under her warm palm, after years of trying, her child was growing.

She and her husband had tried for years. She’d had issues, then it turned out he had issues, they tried this, they tried that, she was injected with something, he was injected with something else, doctors suggested this thing and then that thing, some of those things costing ridicules sums of money they didn’t have. Nothing, nothing worked. She was out of time. He was out of Hope.

Then it happened by accident, no science, just passion.

The memory of telling him last week made her smile. The look of sheer, shocked joy on her husband’s face when she revealed her doctor’s confirmation – he hadn’t suspected anything was up until that moment – was pure gold. A rush of electric bliss. Enormous tons of anxiety and sadness evaporated. She’d been floating ever since, happy inside her bubble, shielded from all discontent. Her husband was too, but he would dissolve into intense darkness, she thought rather off handedly, when she told him about tonight. She would leave him to it, and she didn’t feel guilty about that. Maybe she just wouldn't say anything to anybody.

When the Event began, she didn’t think about her husband. She thought about a scumbag ex-boyfriend who had verbally abused and humiliated her until she could escape him. She thought about him because one of his favorite movies, which she’d endured six times, featured George S. Patton telling a colleague that the thing which scared him most was the idea of a bullet coming straight for his nose.

A bullet coming straight for her nose.

She’d looked into her telescope monitor tonight at the star system Eta Carinae which contained two stars with five million times the luminosity of the Sun. At 12:16 PM the stars collided and collapsed as a black hole. The combined matter of both stars swirled into a high-density accretion disk that fell into the hole, drove relativistic jets along the rotational axis which broke through the stellar envelope as a tightly focused gamma ray burst containing more radiation than the Sun would emit during its entire 10-billion-year lifecycle. It had all happened in a split second from 7,500 light years away, and at 12:16 PM that night it struck the lens of the telescope and was immediately identified by her instrument as gamma rays.

Many gamma ray bursts are detected for less than two seconds. Most for a little more than two seconds. They emanate from billions of light years away. None had been observed sparking within the Milky Way Galaxy. But Eta Carinae is in the Milky Way, a relatively close 7,500 light years away, its gamma ray burst was pointed straight at Earth and lasted for 11,308 seconds. 3 hours, 14 minutes, 11 seconds.

She chewed her salad and knew that the moment gamma rays struck the atmosphere oxygen and nitrogen molecules began forming nitrogen oxide and then nitrogen dioxide gas which would reduce ozone by up to 75% making it ill-advised to go outside. The gas would create photochemical smog blocking sunlight and triggering a cosmic winter. Finally, toxic levels of acid rain would fall. These effects would last for years, long enough to produce global level extinction. It had happened before, 450 million years ago, when a gamma ray burst causing the Late Ordovician Mass Extinction ended 85% of life on Earth.

And she didn’t care. She didn’t. Not a whit. Satellites equipped with senor arrays would have detected the burst, reported it, and the world would collectively freak out in a few hours. She calmly ate her salad with the divine French dressing. There was life inside her. She had created it. She glowed with it and would not be discouraged of it. The rest of the universe could take a flying leap.

- CH

* * *

Writer’s note: As we have become a society easily seduced by conspiracy theories and catastrophes of all manner, lest I contribute to the foolishness let me quickly say that scientists believe the events of this tale are extremely unlikely. Gamma ray bursts are not only exceedingly rare and too distant to cause the Earth lasting damage. They are also very tightly focused beams and even if one were to occur closer – have to be within 8,000 light years - it would have to be pointed right at us to do any harm. Further, theories that the Late Ordovician Mass Extinction was caused by a Gamma ray burst are not only just theories, they are only minority theories. Even if one were to occur as described in this story, the radiation signatures of Gamma ray bursts vary so drastically that the effects can only be guessed at. I’ve used it here simply as a counterpoint to the powerful rush the lead character is experiencing.

Perhaps a better story line – humans knew nothing of gamma radiation until the first nuclear blasts, and we knew nothing of cosmic gamma ray bursts until we developed sensors to detect whether or not the other guys had tested new weapons. So it was the development of life-ending technology that led to the discovery of an even more powerful life-ending force of nature to remind us how puny we are. So proceeds the branches of The Tree Of Knowledge. Now bite this apple …

* * *

Rumble Butt

“Oh, man, this just plain sucks ass!” the private moaned, but only to the other private with him.

“Uh-huh,” the other private agreed, though with considerably less rancor. He’d arrived a couple weeks earlier and was used to it.

“I didn’t come over to sit here and freeze,” the private sort of looked back over his shoulder, over the top of the hole, back through the thick trees and snow towards the platoon’s shelter at the old farm 150 yards back. With every word, every breath, a cloud of vapor exited his body and froze before his eyes. Eventually he might learn everyone expected grumbling and didn’t care what he thought. Might.

“Yeah, well, this is only your second night doing it whereas it’s my 10th,” the other private said, teeth chattering, “So …”

The private rubbed his gloved hands together vigorously for what good it would do. He sighted down the machine gun barrel for the thousandth time that night. They were on a rise that overlooked a fair piece of semi-open ground, but for the thousandth time all he could see in the dark was trees and snow. “Will you listen to that cold friggin’ wind!” he sneered, buck toothed, all gung-ho extroversion.

The other private had been too busy shivering to notice, but when he turned his attention to it, yeah, wind in the treetops seemed to have picked up. “Just another hour,” he clutched his arms around his body, head tucked, as introverted in posture as in temperament and as sick of the private’s would-be warrior schtick as he was the freezing cold. “We’ll be relieved, and we can go back and get warm.”

“I hope they’re not late again.”

“They usually are.”

“That Lieutenant has got the platoon pretty snug in that barn back there, like he expects us to be here for a while.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I still don’t understand why we don’t just go charging off in that direction,” the private waved a hand off towards the ground they were covering, “There’s nothing to stop us.”

The other private said, “I think it has something to do with supply lines. Anyway, the next platoon is a mile that way, so we’re not exactly massing for an attack. We’re more like on guard duty.”

“Guard duty for what?”

“We’re just watching the line.”

“Watching the line for what,” the private was disgusted. “They’ve given up.”

The other private didn’t say anything.

“Damn war was over before I even got here! Veterans back warm and cozy in the barn got to have all the fun, now they send us out to do the shit work.”

The other private said, “They don’t act like they’ve had any fun.” He noticed that the sound of the wind in the trees seemed to have picked up and sounded funny.

“And they really treat us like crap. Hardly talk to us. Won’t even learn our names.”

“Well, I think some of them have lost some buddies. Actually, I think they all have.”

The private looked back over his shoulder again, this time checking carefully that no one was back there, and lowered his voice. “Do you think they’re scared?”

The other private considered that. “I suppose, maybe. Shouldn’t you be?”

The private ignored the question if he’d heard it. “They should turn us lose; we’ll show ‘em!”

“Uh-huh,” the other private said. He noticed the world had lightened just ever so slightly. Dawn was sneaking up on them. More details ghosted through the dark. He looked into the treetops and noticed, despite the wind, he saw little movement by the frozen branches in their tops. It seemed to him the wind had picked up even more, but it wasn’t gusting; it was a constant howl, and more like a rumble. Then he felt a vibration in the icy ground that came up through his butt. “Hey…“, he started to say.

Then the world around them exploded. Shells smashed into the earth to their left, to their right, behind and in front of them, tops of trees shattered and rained down. Both terrified privates threw themselves deeper into their hole screaming and tried to will their bodies deeper into the ground. The first shots either had heard fired in anger and it was somebody else’s anger. More shells, closer, farther, all around and above them. The private peed his pants but didn’t notice. Neither was sure how long it went on, but when it stopped they were half buried in dirt and tree branches that had been blasted into their hole and the wind, the rumble, was even louder. They peaked over the rim of their hole and saw, less than a half mile from their position, a wall of German tanks, seemed like dozens and dozens of German tanks, moving towards them fast with German soldiers trailing in their wake.

“Oh, crap!” the other private screamed and grabbed the machine gun, pulled back on the cocking lever and fired off several rounds before being tackled off it.

“Are you nuts!” the private screamed, “They’ll see us! We have to get back to the platoon!” He began pulling the other private out of the hole.

“The machine gun,” the other private reached for it.

“Leave it!” They heard bullets striking the trees around them.

“My rifle!”

“Leave it,” the private pulled the other private over the lip of hole and they began running, almost in different directions. “This way!” he shouted. “The barn is this way.” And beyond it, Bastogne.

The other private shifted direction and followed. As it happened, not in the direction of the barn.

- CH

* * *

BTW: The photo art and prose included in any given post are separate creations and rarely have anything to do with each other. Duality and such …

The Ride

When he smelled the ocean he was disappointed. He had thought it was further away, though it was a trick of wind and atmospheric conditions that he could smell it that far inland, and the scent lasted for only an instant. In fact it was still quite way off, he still had some time, but it was close. He could slow down and milk every mile as much as the family and friends he traveled with would let him. He supposed he might veer off to the north or south. They had veered one way or another before, of course, but always as a group, and if he did it now on his own he would most certainly be leaving people behind, and he couldn’t bear that. He wondered if he might simply turn around and go back. If it were possible to do that would he meet the same people moving in the other direction? No, it was too fanciful a notion. He further supposed he might just stop. Just stay right here as if suspended, and let the rest go on without him. That struck him as intolerably lonely, perhaps even cowardly. He decided whatever direction he tried to turn would eventually lead him to an ocean, and if he tried to stay there the earth over time would crumble away, and the ocean would come to him. So he smiled and strapped on his helmet, put on his favorite tunes, kicked the bike into gear and into motion, coasting for the most part, eventually to glide up to the wide sandy beach and blue water and brilliant sunset on the horizon and the journey’s end.

- CH

* * *

BTW: The photo art and prose included in any given post are separate creations and rarely have anything to do with each other. Duality and such …

Turns Out It’s My Fault

“It’s my fault,” he had laid his head back on the deck chair beside the pool and closed his eyes behind his sunglasses. “My god, I’m to blame for this!”

The younger and nearest of the two women with him looked up from where she dangled her feet into the cool blue water and asked, “What’s that, darlin’?”

“My fault,” he shook his head and had real lament in his voice. “I just didn’t realize.” This caught the attention of the older woman working a crossword puzzle at a small table with a large, sun-blocking umbrella sprouting from the center of it. She was just slightly more than half the age of the man in the recliner’s nearly 80 years and, between the two women, came closest to constituting his partner.

“What’s your fault, dear?” she asked.

He said, “Ever since stuff like the ‘X-Files’, all the scripts of government conspiracies, surveillance, secret programs, black helicopters and drones, corrupt police; I never thought anyone would actually believe that crap!” he fidgeted and jerked his arms.

The older woman had been with him in one role or another for a dozen years and knew him well enough to see when he was truly agitated and right now was one of those times. She looked to the younger woman, leaning back on her arms, long dark hair tossing with the wind, topless, bottomless but for a few strings, barely 25, who said, “People are stupid, darlin’, it’s not your fault.”

No, no,” his voice was rising, “I put ideas in their heads, I’m to blame!”

“Baby,” the older woman rose from her table and walked to him, “Let’s get out of the sun.” She looked to the younger one and said, “Put a shirt on and help me get him in the house,” then again to the man, “Baby, let’s get inside where it’s cool and have something to drink.”

They each took an arm – the younger one had pulled on an oversized T-shirt – and steered him towards the sliding doors into the mansion. He didn’t fight them. The cool, filtered air rushed over them as they left the bright, Beverly Hills sun, and they wadded into it, past the study where the man displayed a score of Emmy’s attained by decades producing television shows, many about just the things he was describing. Half dozen Oscars for producing movies were also on the shelves, plus a smattering of Golden Globes, People’s Choice Awards, Bafta’s and other sundry hardware. The older woman called for staff to bring him a large pineapple juice on ice. They got him into the drawing room with the big, north-facing windows, dark woods and cool stone, and sat him in a fluffy armchair. They sat on the couch to his right. The pineapple juice was brought. He still seemed agitated. The older woman reached over and took his hand, looked kindly at him with her soft, brown eyes. He seemed grateful for her affection and seemed to smile slightly at her but was still trembling.

“I just didn’t know,” he said. “The Cold War was over, so couldn’t blame things on the Russians. Cowboys and Indians hadn’t worked for decades. War movies were passé. Gangsters were overdone; there can only be so many Soprano’s. There were no clear villains. Viewers need villains, they need a clear sense of right and wrong, good and bad. Blaming things on the Arabs seemed racist, plus we were getting so much money from them. Horror movies worked, but only with a certain audience. Thank god for zombies. So for everything else we made stuff up. Alien bodies hidden in a warehouse, classified government plots, mass murderers sneaking over the border, exploitive corporations. Any institution of any kind we could make into a heartless autocracy out to get the little guy. It worked! Hell, we even had the Vatican hiding the Holy Grail! Plus, conspiracies are fun! Everybody loves to get lost in an imaginative conspiracy story, especially when it draws from silly superstitions or fears. It was so easy; it was like printing money!

“But people actually bought into it! That fake, supposedly unscripted reality TV stuff didn’t help, it made people gullible and believe what was on TV must be real. Thank god I didn’t produce any of that crap! Those dumb asses that stormed the Capital, they actually believed they were overthrowing the government and that asshole was going to march in with an army and take over. They believed it even as that asshole was abandoning them! They STILL believe it!”

The older woman had taken his hand in both of hers by then, and was squeezing it and shaking it lightly, “Baby, Baby,” she spoke softly, trying to pull him out of his anxiety. She brought his hand to her mouth and kissed it. “Baby,” she said again.

He said, “We thought we were giving them an hour or so to escape their troubles. We ended up creating alternate realities, alternate ways of thought that let them rationalize every stereotype and prejudice hiding in their souls. I created all this. It’s all my fault!”

“There, there, my love” the older woman stroked his arm, half out of the couch so she could be closer to him, fairly certain and worried she wasn’t getting through to him. “It’s not your fault. It’s not! You’ve brought people so much happiness with your stories.”

He shook his head.

The younger woman, watching and listening to a scene far too serious for her, said, “I know what you mean, darlin’. I meet so many guys who think I’m like I am in my porn movies. I mean, how dumb do they have to be?”

And he looked at her with wide, horror filled eyes, understanding full well, even if she didn’t, that he was one of those guys; that’s why she was there. “Oh, dear holy god,” he cried, “What have I done!”

- CH

* * *

BTW: The photo art and prose included in any given post are separate creations and rarely have anything to do with each other. Duality and such …

Smugglers

“If I’m going to help you, you’re going to have to give me some answers,” the Chief Inspector said, low tone, expression mostly hidden in the dimness of the bar, tucked away like the corner booth in which they hunched over their bourbons, leaning slightly towards one another to prevent their words from wandering. “It’s time for the truth.”

“The truth,” the Agent repeated slowly, lifted the glass to his lips and sipped, expression as hidden in the din as the Chief Inspector’s. Then he asked, “What would you like to know?” And just enough of his eyes were visible, just enough tone sounded through his voice that the Chief Inspector knew ‘the truth’ was exactly what he would get; they had moved beyond their conflict and subterfuge and had reached a fundamental moment of clarity. Each needed the other or both were ruined. Neither would live through the week. Unless they helped each other; unless they came clean.

“Why are you protecting the woman,” the Chief Inspector asked, “Why shouldn’t I throw her in a cell right now.”

“She is not who you think,” the Agent said. “Not what you think. And she did not kill the director.”

“She was seen. There is a gun with her prints.”

“The man she killed,” the Agent told him. “Was not the director.”

The Chief Inspector’s eyes widened. “His body has been identified …”

“Not him.”

“His body is stinking in the morgue right now!”

“Not him.”

“Then who!”

The Agent took another sip of the bourbon; a cheap bourbon that grated his throat on the way down. The pause, he knew, would slow the Chief Inspector’s anger, return their conversation to an equilibrium. He said, “A duplicate.”

The Chief Inspector gaped at him, speechless.

“You said you wanted the truth,” the agent said, “And you should know the truth, now. But in this case, the truth will not set you free. Rather, what you are about to learn, while perhaps forestalling imminent doom, will only immerse you in more serious problems.”

Now it was the Chief Inspector’s turn to pause, take a sip of his bourbon, slow the emotions of the moment down. “If I do not arrest an assailant within the next 48 hours, and in so doing find the money the director stole, then the people from whom the director stole the money will come for me.”

“They will assume, given that everyone believes the woman killed the director and that you appear not to have found her, that you are in fact in league with her. You can see how they would reach that conclusion.”

The Chief Inspector acquiesced the point, changed directions. “Her prints on the gun …”

“They’re her's, absolutely. She definitely killed the man in the morgue. She is not squeamish about extinguishing life.”

“But the man in the morgue is not the director.”

“The man in the morgue is a duplicate brought in to provide access to the department.”

“And the money?”

“Oh, the director did indeed steal that, but had he not been replaced he would have done what he needed to do with it and returned it from whence it had come. The corruption within your department is legendary,” the Agent seemed to crack a smile.

The Chief Inspector waited. This was all a confusing circle. If the truth was coming, it had to be now, and he knew the Agent was aware of that.

“Your world is not alone. The duplicate, and at least another full dozen who have replaced members of your department, was to begin collecting human beings for ‘consumption’. Your director has likely been consumed by now. These beings duplicate and replace humans they come in contact with. Parts of their world is starving and, although they are unsanctioned, smuggling fresh, delicious humans is quite lucrative. Your department provides perfect cover for gathering human beings with a minimum of fuss, at least in the short term. They will take what they can and move on.

“It is my job to stop them. But to do that, I have to find them, and I can only do that with your help.”

The Chief Inspector stared at the agent, mouth open and eyes wide, not believing but not having another explanation for the things he’d seen.

​The Agent nodded, placed his hand flat on the table between them. “Watch,” he said, and the Chief Inspector saw the Agent’s hand slowly fade away, gone, nothing, then slowly fade back. “I didn’t replace anyone,” he said. “I’m more of a projection. But I needed something more substantial to neutralize the duplicates, and that’s where the woman comes in. She did replace someone – someone we identified as having special skills. An assassin. That’s what she is.”

“How does this help me?” the Chief Inspector asked after taking a deep breath.

The Agent said, “The advent of your director’s theft is a complication, but perhaps a fortuitous one as it brought us in contact. I can provide evidence that the gun with the woman’s prints was planted by one of the duplicates. Then he will be eliminated. I can also replace the money the director stole. End of problem; well, that one.”

The Chief Inspector looked carefully at the Agent, fully cognizant that, all this being true, he was not staring into human eyes. Only a facsimile. “Where is the woman?”

“In the car.”

A moment. There could be no alternative now. The Chief Inspector asked, “You implied additional problems.”

The Agent said, “There are many more of these cells you must help us find. And I believe they intend to introduce a virus …”

- CH

* * *

BTW: The photo art and prose included in any given post are separate creations and rarely have anything to do with each other. Duality and such …

The Living Yeast, C’mon, Man!

There was still no definitive answer as the monk understood definitive answers to be, as he understood messages from God were so received. But he was young for an abbot, so perhaps he had misunderstood how it was supposed to work. Or perhaps, he wondered, Father Franciscus had misrepresented the clarity with which God spoke with him. He considered such speculation to be spurious, unworthy of him, and extensions of his own weakness and insecurity. This was his first real decision. It must be the correct decision. It must be a decision which justified his appointment. It must not be warped by blaming someone else for his own sin. And thus he prayed, and meditated, as the single dim candle in the chapel melted and withered to nothing, its flame occasionally buffeted by the draft which ghosted through the old structure.

He felt an answer derive from a thought which wasn’t an answer and wasn’t about the problem at hand. His determination to make the right decision could in fact lead to the wrong one. The arrogance and ego inherent in the desire to be perfect; no human can be perfect. No human is without fault, without sin. That so fervently seeking God’s help in a decision so human in its nature for the simple reason that a correct decision would feed his ego was a far worse sin that stumbling in his humanness and choosing a course that was not entirely perfect.

He blew out what tiny flame still lived by the nub of the candle and left the chapel. Dawn was just fading in, just casting its first glow in the east. He walked slowly towards his dormitory, the cool morning breeze against his skin, his hands behind his back. He stepped over the place where the sidewalk had crumbled and sunk. It reminded him of the repairs so many of the monastery’s buildings required. There were leaky roofs, there was bad plumbing, there weren’t even enough working light bulbs. His decision, which at this point he’d made because, after all, he knew what the right thing to do was, would mean they would all have to scrimp by for a little while longer. But just a little while, he thought, and it is the right thing to do. Just another month, and the abbey’s reputation for its good works would remain strong, and then they could address these earthly issues. So foolish, he shook his head, to have lost an entire night to worry when he knew all along the right course. He had been, after all, a master brewer before becoming an abbot, so the answer had already been given to him. He hadn’t needed to engage in overt theatrics. He only needed self-confidence. And then he thought, well, this was a good lesson for a new abbot, and in that he saw its value.

He announced his decision at breakfast. He said, “We will not yet sell our Trappist beer in Westmalle as it has not yet sufficiently aged. We shall pray for strength and set our sights on five weeks hence. However, from now on we WILL be keeping an extra five percent of each batch for ourselves. I mean, c’mon …”

- CH

* * *

BTW: The photo art and prose included in any given post are separate creations and rarely have anything to do with each other. Duality and such …

Coyote Road

The narrow, 3 a.m. blacktop road was as deserted as the inside of an empty box, vacant as far as the eye could see ahead, clear in the mirror behind. He went scooting along west with the top down, warm air scented by mesquite blowing through his hair, music wafting from the speaker in the dash. Dead in the middle of a seven-hour drive through the high desert he’d decided to make at night under the glorious full moon. He’d dropped the ragtop after the first hour and felt ecstasy, gliding along through a night that glowed ethereal in the moonlight, seemingly as removed from the travails of Planet Earth as the surface of Mars.

Great, until the tire blew. Even then, he had a full size spare and a jack and should have been fine. What he lacked for whatever reason was the lug wrench necessary to take the blown tire off and put the good one on. The car sat lifeless now on the side of the road, left rear tire dangling as if something behind him had reached out with its claw and just managed to snag a piece of him. His cell phone had a 75 percent charge, and no signal. No lights in the distance suggested a town or even a farm; flat and barren landscape towards mountains miles and miles to the north, desolate desert of nothing but sage brush all the way the edge of the world (or possibly just the horizon) to the south. Somewhere far off a coyote howled. He was stuck until somebody drove up the blacktop, somebody that was willing to stop and help, probably not until the sun came up and scorched away the dreamscape.

Snagged between what was and what would be.

A tiny point appeared in the desert to the north. He thought he just hadn’t noticed it at first, except it grew ever so slightly larger, larger, moving closer, closer, and he thought it might be a human being. He took a step or two out into the desert knowing he shouldn’t – snakes and whatnot – stood there watching for a moment; yeah, that’s a man, walking towards me; what was anyone doing out there at this hour? He retreated back to his wounded vehicle and watched, and at about 100 feet the approaching man called out, “Need a little help?”

He nodded. “Sure,” he called back. The approaching man wore a faded red shirt, blue jeans, and had crossed the desert to him in sandals, and not substantial looking sandals at that. He had copper colored skin and long grey hair that the wind tossed about and he carried a homemade looking backpack of some sort.

He came nearer and said, “I thought so.” He went around the car, straight to the wounded tire as though he knew exactly what was wrong, pulled a lug wrench from his pack, dropped to his knees, and went to work. “Where are you from?” he asked as the first lug nut came off.

“Well,” he said, “A city back there where I lived until a few days ago.”

“Uh-huh,” Copper Man nodded. “Where are you going?”

He said, “Somewhere that way. Don’t truly know for sure yet.

Copper Man smiled, set the tire aside for storage in the trunk. “Roll me the good one, would you?” The man did so, and Copper Man lifted it onto the wheel. “Not many people pass through at this time.”

“Yeah. I thought it might be nice, driving through the desert at night. It is too, with the full moon.”

Copper Man worked the lug nuts. “You’re right about that, there is magic in the desert. The spirits come out on nights like this. Do you feel them?”

“Actually, yeah, I think I do.”

Copper Man finished, put the lug wrench back in his pack, began jacking the car back down. He nodded at the blown tire. ”Mą’ii.”

“Huh?”

“Mą’ii. ‘Coyote’ to you. Very annoying. Wants to hold you back,” Copper Man said. “If you had a woman with you, he’d be screwing her right now. Trick you into letting him. That’s what he does.”

He was confused but looked back up the road behind him despite himself. “There was a girl …” he trailed off.

Copper Man said, “Someone else is making love with her now.” A statement, not a question. “And still tried to hold you there. Used the magic of this night to find you.” He stood, tossing the pack over his shoulder. “Now you can move on.”

He tried to pull money out of his wallet as Copper man walked back into the desert. “Wait! Let me …”

“I can’t use it,” Copper Man said and began walking back towards … nothing, Hundreds and hundreds of square miles of nothing.

“Who are you? What’s your name?”

“You’d never be able to pronounce it,” Copper Man called back over his shoulder, then pointed to the full moon falling closer towards the mountains. “Get out of here before Coyote finds you again.”

He seemed to fade back into the desert faster than he had appeared.

The man watched him disappear. He felt an eerie sense of malevolence stalking him. The ethereal moonlight seemed more ghostly, less like a dreamscape than a prelude to a nightmare. He threw the blown tire into the trunk, jumped back behind the wheel, floored the accelerator, and blew out of there like the wind.

- CH

* * *

BTW: The photo art and prose included in any given post are separate creations and rarely have anything to do with each other. Duality and such …

Bob And The Alien

Bob created an alien. He made him short and stout with a big nose and sarcastic but loveably so. He made his favorite breakfast food ‘one freshly squeezed cat’, then realized he had just created Alf. He deleted the entire passage, not by highlighting it and hitting ‘Delete’ once but by whamming down on the Delete key one letter at a time over and over like a machine gun, increasing the force and anger with which he struck the keys as he went, thinking about his girlfriend, who was no longer his girlfriend because she had dumped his ass, whom he believed correctly had always loved her cats more than him.

Bob murdered his alien. It didn’t help.

He left the apartment for a coffee shop up the street, had a mocha latté, read his newsfeed, and was depressed by it. Everything he tried to come up with, the conspiracy nuts came up with crap even crazier. He had an impatient publisher and no new ideas. The girlfriend with the cat kept happening, albeit with revolving girlfriends, and it bothered him. Bothered him such that he kept stumbling over it. He had to get away.

An overnight bag, his laptop, his butt behind the wheel of his car and he drove for the next 10 hours, off the Interstate after the first two, mostly with the top down, straight into the boonies. Stayed that night at a cheap motel god knew where, got up at dawn, ate a vending machine Danish, drove for another four hours on two-lane roads, stopped at a café in a tiny little town to go to the bathroom, and decided to have something like lunch there. A BLT. And coffee. Sitting in a booth by the window.

The alien arrived as he nursed his second cup of coffee.

“You’re Bob”, she said and sat down opposite him without waiting for an invitation. “Yeah. I know who you are.” She was slightly portly with shoulder length hair died a weak blue and tipped in purple at the ends. Her face had piercings in one nostril, one eyebrow on the opposite side, and in three places in both ears. Piercings always made Bob feel weird. Vivid, abstract body art on her arms convinced him she had similar all over her body.

He asked, “And you are?”

“I’ve read your novels,” she said, “And seen you on TV. I go by Inev.”

“Inev?”

“Short for Inevitable. It’s my artist’s name. You’ve seen my work.”

“Have I, now?”

“You have one in your study. It’s the one with the blue and purple swirling sunset. You bought it at ‘Leann’s’ over on 48th. I saw it hanging in an interview you did there.”

He knew exactly the painting, and indeed he had bought it at Leann’s Gallery on 48th street. Leann seemed to specialize in finding emerging artists. He recalled the scrawl ‘Inevitable’ in the lower right corner. He’d thought it the title. “Okay,” he said.

She asked, “What brings you out here? Can’t be here for a signing or a lecture, there aren’t any bookstores.”

He measured his response. “Just driving around.”

She looked carefully at him. It was the first time he’d gotten past her piercings and body art to notice how large her eyes seemed, and how phenomenally ice blue they were. “You’re blocked aren’t you?”

He shrugged.

“C’mon”, she began climbing out of the booth. “You’re not going to get unblocked here.”

He said, “You’re not going to break my legs and hide me in the basement, are you?”

She smirked. “We’re going to my studio. There is no basement.”

It was a converted shed on a derelict farm off a gravel road. It was stuffed to the gills with paintings ranging between just started and finished and had a sink and small stove and a commode and a bathtub on one end and a double-size unmade bed on the other. It smelled of paint and solvent. “Have a look through these,” she waved at the paintings. “I liked your novel about the frigate gone aground best. You create a very complete world in that one.”

“Yes,” he said. “That one reviewed the best.” He browsed the canvases, found himself more and more enthralled by the abstract landscapes and lighting, and found himself fixating on a work with bright orange and yellows and turquoise rectangles, a city spread along a burning ocean.

She moved very close to him, touching him. “Let yourself fall into that one,” she whispered.

Three weeks later he had enough of a completed manuscript on his laptop to submit a first draft to his publisher. He stretched next to her in bed early one morning and said, “I’m going to have to get that back to the city.”

She smiled at him half asleep and said, “You have to return to your planet.”

He embraced her, felt himself drawing contentment off her warm body like a magnetic charge. “I’m glad I found your planet.”

Suddenly awake she grabbed him with her eyes, draped one leg over him, left no doubt who was in command. “No,” she said, and she meant it, “This is just my spaceship. And I found you.”

- CH

* * *

BTW: The photo art and prose included in any given post are separate creations and rarely have anything to do with each other. Duality and such …

Partially

“What the hell was that?” he said, his coworkers in the old courthouse basement with him equally wide-eyed after the concussive jolt.

Thing is, he also remembered not saying it. Getting out only “Wha…” after the concussive jolt before it was followed by the shockwave and the world around them exploded as shrapnel. He remembered both saying it and not saying it and he remembered all the details that followed both, seconds, minutes, days, weeks, years and years, as though the splitting atoms split his life into two versions that he led simultaneously.

He said, “What the hell was that?” and Molly across the basement suggesting a second later, “Earthquake,” and Ed, near him by the wall next to the file cabinets just shrugging. Ed was pissed. The judge had sent all three paralegals to the basement to excavate a century old brief that may or may not have been digitized and may or may not still exist and he wanted to see the original if it did. The three of them ran upstairs all the way to the third-floor law library where they could look out the big windows with the rest of the courthouse staff and see the smoke and a little bit of fire from just a block away. A seditionist whose ideological leader had been removed from office had loaded a small plane with explosive but was a crappy pilot and lost control and crashed into the street before he could do anything worse. “That was close,” Molly would say when the facts emerged, but at the moment they simply gawked at the scene for fifteen-twenty minutes and went back to their lives. He got married that fall, just like he’d planned, and in another year finished his juris doctorate and joined a small firm with offices just up the street. He opened his own practice a few years later and built a sterling reputation representing not-for-profits and citizen’s groups in civil proceedings, winning a few landmark cases. He was elected as a state representative a couple times, then as a circuit court judge which he liked a lot better. He and his wife had a daughter who played the piccolo and became a starting point guard in high school. They moved into a large house on a tree lined avenue and restored its historic character. They entertained friends often in their backyard garden with its fountain and fire pit and fragrant honeysuckle. His wife liked gardening and decorating, and their home was a constantly evolving kaleidoscope of color and pattern and imagination. He loved cooking, especially grilling on the patio, and perpetually treated his family and friends to succulent dishes that made their mouths water. They immersed themselves in love and affection, sharing everything and giving back as much as they could, and their lives were full and rich and purposeful. Years and years on he sat on a chair next to the bed on which his wife was soon to die peacefully, and as he held her hand she looked contentedly at him and said, “Thank you for my life.”

But he remembered saying only “Wha…” before the world exploded in shrapnel. When he regained consciousness after he’d no idea how long he found Ed crushed by the file cabinets he’d been next to and Molly shredded by the debris. He was seriously burned, had a perforated ear drum and a concussion, but was alive. He looked up and saw daylight; two floors into the basement of a five-story stone and brick building and he could look up and see the sky. The seditionist hadn’t just carried explosives in his small plane, he’d carried fissionable material in a crude bomb that he detonated one-thousand feet above and a little to the north of the courthouse. Total megatons were only about one-third Hiroshima, but it was intensely dirty. Everything in a quarter-mile radius was flattened, and everything a quarter mile beyond that was burning. He spent the rest of his life seeking, and getting, revenge. He finished his juris doctorate but couldn’t get married as planned because his intended wife had been among the thousands and thousands fried outright or incinerated by the blast. He became a prosecutor and went after everyone even remotely associated with the seditionists, their families, friends, the ideological leader himself and associates, and when he could, anyone who had ever voted for him. He went after them in criminal court. He went after them in civil court. He went after them economically by organizing boycotts, disputing permits and licenses. He was driven by hate. He could not bear the thought of sharing or giving back in anyway that might benefit anyone who had ever sympathized however briefly with the seditionists. He never married, never again formed an affectionate relationship. His hobby was compiling lists of people he could go after and crossing them off once he felt he’d sufficiently ‘got’ them. He cultivated his hate morning, noon, and night. When eventually he lay on his own death bed, succumbing at last to radiation poisoning, memories of BOTH lives swirled around his brain like an acid-fueled spiral. Which was real? Had his psyche imagined a life filled with love to compensate for the hate he felt, or had a hate-filled nightmare been his motivation for filling his world with love? He remembered both lives so vividly. It made no sense, not the least of which because he lovingly held his wife’s hand on her deathbed a decade-plus after bitterly lying on his own, as though time itself moved differently depending on which emotion it flowed through, gliding easily along through one and furtively slogging through the other. And he knew too that once his wife’s hand slipped from his, that life would go on, sadder but still propelled with love, whereas lying on his own death bed he knew he had been partially dead his entire life.

- CH

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BTW: The photo art and prose included in any given post are separate creations and rarely have anything to do with each other. Duality and such …

First Shift

He concluded it was the scotch when he thought about it later before dismissing it, if never, the rest of his life, ever quite forgetting it. He’d had a couple or three single malts at the hotel bar before grabbing a sandwich next door and taking it back to his room on the fourth floor. He figured on gnawing at it in front of the ballgame while sitting around in his underwear, but first, before he turned on the TV and after tossing the bag with the sandwich in it onto the bed, he stood at the window. And shifted.

He equated the feeling to watching a movie about the past. Ancient Egypt, maybe, and there on the desert plain is the half-constructed pyramid of Giza, a couple guys riding camels, other people milling about, as the sun was setting. A serine scene of the past that could only be experienced in the future, detached, through a lens, untouchable, and long vanished.

LIKE what it felt like, but not IT, because through the north facing fourth floor hotel window he looked down at his own time and all he could see was traffic. The Interstate moving rapidly east-west, the busy thoroughfare across the overpass north-south, the sun already set, no buildings of note, no landmarks, just crowded headlights of moving vehicles bathed in a yellowish hue of mercury filled high pressure sodium streetlights. A modern pyramid in motion.

And he wasn’t there.

The world before him could exist only for a brief flash of time and he had shifted out-of-body, watched it like an archeologist examining a fossil, utterly removed from the reality of it and emotionless. Snapshot of fleeting technology, economics, and sociology; lives lived radically different from their parents and hopelessly obsolete from their children. The person he had shifted out of was in there, and he had been removed into some future being, looking down, seeing the past, recognizing existence as a fleeting monolith destined for demolition and reconstruction and feeling zero ownership of it because it wasn’t him. He existed somewhere else, in some other time, far in the future, in a completely different life.

But suddenly he couldn’t bear it. He wasn’t sure later how long he had stood there, seconds or minutes, likely felt longer than it actually was. Something in the scene yanked back at him. It was as though his mind had stumbled onto non-linear perception senses waiting right there to be accessed, and the rest of the brain quickly suppressed it, like a psychosis blocking memory. An ability he had not sufficiently evolved mental acuity to interpret sanely. He felt dizzy. He could feel his feet on the floor with the sensation of pins and needles. He laid back on the bed, his head swimming.

The scotch, he decided. Just a little drunk. That’s all.

As his linear life continued, the sensation would occur briefly again, but never as profoundly. And having shifted before it became less frightening, even to the point he would try to bring it on at will, at which he had limited success. He began to consider – again, fueled by scotch while home sitting on his deck or in his study – that life indeed was not linear, but the ability to perceive such was limited by evolutionary progress. Just as different creatures had different abilities to see or hear or smell, perception of time was relative. He began to consider that, properly evolved, it was possible to shift into other time periods as easily as walking into other rooms. He imagined the mechanics of shifting, theorizing it couldn’t simply occur in thin air but required other beings to shift into and out of. That each shift required two or more beings sharing their perceptions across time. He wondered if shifting required shared acquiescence, or if, as it must have been that first time with him, it was sometimes imposed, or perhaps simply an accident. As the scotch flowed, he wondered if he had actually experienced his own life, or if it was someone else living through him. Or if, in fact, it was he who had shifted and confiscated another’s life in another time, and he was in fact somewhere else, in some other time, far away.

On this first shift, however, whether accidental or not, it was all too much. So he shrugged it off, lifted his butt off the mattress so he could strip down to his underwear, turned on the TV and began gnawing his sandwich. And tried to forget about it.

- CH

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​BTW: The photo art and prose included in any given post are separate creations and rarely have anything to do with each other. Duality and such …