Posts tagged "fiction":
The Ants, the Butterflies, and the Wasps
The leaves of the trees rustled in the breeze so far overhead they were inaudible. The sun shone down in spots through the gaps between them and bathed the limbs and lower shrubs and far below, the forest floor, with light. The dead leaves on the ground moldered and rotted into the soil below, and the worms and fungi digested them into soil that fed the trees their nutrients, the roots of trees reaching out to one another under the ground.
(...)Long road home
“They used to go ten, twenty times faster than we can go now,” Mama says as we trudge past the rotting carcasses. They’re all rust, now, dissolving under the rain and time. Their wheels are stripped bare: the rubba that once covered them now soles my shoes. We walk along the haway, on the open side, towards sitee in the distance. “Time was,” Mama goes on, “they could make this trip in an hour. Now it’s all day we’ve gotta go on foot just to get there.” She gestures to the other side of the gulf between the two parallel stripes of stone that make up the haway; it’s clogged with carcasses of these cast-off chariots, “but now you see what’s come of it. That’s pride, which goeth before the fall.”
(...)And there was light
The shuttle hung over the earth. It hummed for its crew alone; the sound of its positioning thrusters was silent in the vacuum. They nudged it this way and that, aligning it ever more exactly with its prey. The earth below shone blue in the sunrise. Clouds swirled far below, and the horizon was curved in the distance. The shuttle was blocky, resembling a parallelepiped beluga whale with a red seven-pointed star where there should have been an eye. It faced straight up, its main thrusters towards the earth below. Alongside it hung a piece of space junk, an old space mine: a train-car sized lump of solar panels, antennas; at its heart, a chunk of toxic debris. A booster pointed out of its top into space, and its bottom was a mound hanging towards the ground like a hammer. The shuttle crept in beside it, slowly, subtly. Then all was perfectly still.
(...)Wocomac
That night was the first full moon after Analise and I fell in love. It was the summer after the last year of high school, and it was hot. We lived on a small island called Wocomac, a sand bar east of the mainland, held together by trees. On the inland, west side there’s a sound full of good fish; on the ocean, east side there’s the Gulf Stream. The sands gather on the shelf at the edge of the continent. Where grasses and bushes and trees take hold they keep a bunch of sand together long enough for it to become an island.
(...)The Fountainhead
The fountain pours into you. Your eyes and ears are filled with its blessings: the sweet relief of stimulus. Never a video too long, a song too loud, a word too harsh; everything is exactly as you want it to be. Enjoy! Everyone else is, the fountain tells you so. You watch the people dance and sing and run off into the sunset, but never more than you can stand: a count of eight, a couple of lines, a few strides, then the next. You twitch your finger and another thing comes into view. You raise your eyes: who can help you? Only the fountain, and it opens itself to you as it opens itself to everyone, just for them, for you are unique and special, as is everyone. There’s no one like you, and no one understands you the way the fountain does. You raise your arms to touch it, but it’s so difficult. They’re so heavy, your arms. When did you need them last? They drop to your side and splash in the water.
(...)Madeline's lost
Madeline and Sally check in to the Hotel Benjamin on Tuesday afternoon. Madeline (or “Maddy,” as her parents called her) has never stayed in such a nice hotel before, so she’s excited. She walks into the big lobby with Sally, who has a suitcase on wheels and a purse across her shoulder. Maddy’s clothes are all in Sally’s bag, but Maddy carries her backback with her blanket curled up in the bottom, and her bear’s head poking out of the top of the bag watches behind Maddy as she walks. Sally and Maddy go up to the big desk where the man waits for them. Sally talks to the man over the desk, but Maddy can hardly see: the rim of the marble counter meets her right in the forehead. The man (Sally calls him the “receptionist,” which Maddy finds difficult to say: “recepyoniss”; Sally laughs) hands Sally a key and points across the lobby to the elevators. Sally and Maddy cross a sea of carpet to reach the golden doors. Maddy makes faces at her reflection.
(...)Sitee
From a scenario by and with the assistance of Ben Lawrence.
(...)In The Eyes
There was a promotion that night and I wanted to dance and have some cheap drinks and maybe pick up a little something nice to go to bed with. I’d been dragging my ass around Rome all day getting my shit in order before I headed back to the States in the morning and doing all kinds of admin work on my contacts1 in the meantime to make sure I had everything ready to go before I headed out, and I needed to get out to calm my nerves from the exertion.
(...)Doomscrolling
It happened again last night: I was doomscrolling1 through the endless feed of trash videos the algorithm serves to me, and I scrolled right by it. The video: this time, it was called “do you want to be free?” No thumbnail, no channel, no view count: just a black rectangle, and the title: “do you want to be free?” Before I could react, my thumb had already scrolled past it; I scrolled up to look for it, but it was gone.
(...)Stewart is Lost
The car slithered into the parking lot like a particularly aggressive species of beetle: all angles and sharp corners, its hooded headlights gazing angrily forward, daring anybody to tell the car’s owner that the car wasn’t worth the obscene amount of money that its owner had payed for it. The concrete was a dismal gray and reflected the dismal gray sky, which occasionally sent down a desultory rain drop to keep the concrete unpleasantly damp. The car parked. Its driver’s side door opened, and out stepped a man who, if possible, looked even more like an aggressive beetle than the car he stepped out of.
(...)The Cat Dies
You see, first comes the obsession, a thought that intrudes on you and won’t leave; it just swirls around and around your brain without stopping. For example, you might be tormented by the thought “what if I go to hell?” Of course, you may have some reason to suspect that you will be damned—which of us has never done anything that might be held against us?—or you may not believe in hell at all—the afterlife is a very unpopular notion in these oh-so-wise, oh-so-skeptical days—but nevertheless, you can’t stop thinking it: “what if I go to hell?” When you awake, it’s nagging at you, and you go through your day as best you can, all the while worrying at the same thought like a cold-sore in your mind. Obsession.
(...)