Notes on the Previous Five Stories

A bunch of tales slightly longer than three-minute (600-words-or-less) stories this time, though all still falling under the realm of microfiction (which seems to be the literary form that suits my temperament best – more on that later, maybe). Origins:

1. “Walking Home” was a counterweight to the story immediately preceding it, “Silent Sue,” in which I met a sad little girl who was well and truly lost. I wanted to reassure myself (and Sue, in that strange oneiric way that is one feature of our imaginations) that sometimes little lost children can be found – or can find themselves.

2. “Possessed” came from a story suggestion by Lily Rose: a demon is possessed by the spirit of a human and requires an exorcism to get rid of it. Given the subject matter, the prospect of going into the dark to pull this one out made me more than a little nervous, and yet no story in this blog came out as easily as this one did. And it actually came with bits of sweetness inside it. Weird.

3. “Dreams” more properly belongs in the previous suite of five stories since it, like “Silent Sue,” was written in response to Mary C. Charest’s challenge: construct a dream within a dream – where one dreamer starts and another wakes up. I actually made a draft of it before I wrote “Silent Sue,” but it took me longer to get it into shape, so it got left out.

4. “Made in Heaven” was written because nearly all my recent stories have been somewhat bleak and I wanted to come up with something sappy and sentimental and unambiguously upbeat for a change. So, yeah, I wrote a love story.

The accompanying photo, by the way, was one I took from the real White Island, off the island of Camiguin in the Philippines, where I did feel like I was walking on the ocean itself, under a sky on fire. Sadly, although I was with people, I wasn’t with anyone special.

5. “Silent Screams” came about from a simple, innocent goal: to write a science fiction story. This is what emerged. What can I say? Whole sections of my brain are mucky and apocalyptic. And apparently raving lunatics and caustic bitches live there. (“And he was such a nice, quiet guy…”)

Silent Screams

Amber saw her first time traveler the day they were wrapping up Episode 6. Tonya was right: they were annoying as fuck.

She was hurrying down the last block to her job at Real World Productions, dragging deep from her cigarette to finish it off before she got to the building entrance. He popped up right in front of her, floating several feet off the ground, facing her square. Which meant the thing she saw – what stopped her in her tracks and made her gasp and jump back – was a wrinkled pecker peeking out forlornly from under a salt and pepper bush, right in her line of sight.

Startle reflex shot adrenaline into blood already juiced with a double jamocha. She yelled, “You fuckin’ perv!” Then she raised her eyes, taking in the splay of ribs on his bony chest, the thin, contorted face screaming silently at her, and realized who he was. She heard cries from all around her. “It’s one of them!” a woman behind her shrieked.

She looked around and saw she was in the epicenter of a scrum that had formed instantly around the time traveler, a flash crowd that trapped her in and grew outward like a ripple as more people came up from all directions. She saw the slack-jawed expressions, the looks of disgust in some of the women, the mocking sneers from a gaggle of teenagers. Hands dipped into pockets and purses and came up with camera phones.

Oh, come on, people! I’m late already, she thought. It’s not the fucking Rapture. Haven’t you seen enough of them online? She sighed, dropped her cigarette and stubbed it out with her boot toe, and got out her own phone. She supposed she should take her own video, for posterity or whatever.

She couldn’t step back to get a wide shot of the man, so she pointed her phone to shoot his face (she sure as hell wasn’t going to focus on his shriveled prick). She got half a minute of his red-faced mouthing before her image screen suddenly showed power lines against slate gray sky. He was gone. She put her phone back in her bag.

The crowd, mumbling disjointedly, broke up slowly, jostling up and down the sidewalk but steering clear of the patch of air where the time traveler had been. She weaved her way through, got to the portico of her building, went in, took the elevator to the fifth floor, and, after a quick scan to see if Stanley was around, rushed stealthily into her cubicle.

Tonya peered over the divider. She said, “He’s meeting with the cable network guys. You lucked out, bitch. What happened?”

Amber hung her jacket on the coat hook and fired up her monitor. “One of them appeared, right in front of me.”

“One of what?”

“One of those time traveler guys.”

“No! Where?”

“On the sidewalk, almost in front of the building. You were right: they’re pretty fucked up.”

“I know! Right?” She disappeared, came around, and entered Amber’s cubicle. “What’d he look like?”

“Like all of them: naked, scrawny, screaming his ass off. You know: on mute.”

“How far away?”

“God, like five feet from me. Here.” Amber took out her phone and handed it over. Tonya played the clip. Revulsion wrinkled her nose. “One I saw was two stories up in the air. Girl, you could have stepped up to him and given him a blowjob.”

“Oh, Gaad!” Amber grabbed her phone back. “What the fuck, bitch?”

“What? You would have been sucking air. You can walk right through them, you know. They’re not there.”

“Who’s not there?” They turned to the cubicle entrance. It was just like Jeremy to sneak up on them.

“Nothing, creep,” Amber said at the same time that Tonya said, “A time traveler.”

“No shit,” Jeremy said, ambling closer. “Somebody saw a time traveler?”

Tonya said, “She did. Full frontal.”

Jeremy frowned. “They’re only naked because non-living matter can’t be projected back in time, not even clothes. Because inanimate objects don’t experience time. That’s what the quantum guys at CERN say, anyway.” He was the geek who kept all the office work stations and editing machines running. He was harmless enough, and smart some ways, but his earnestness made Amber and Tonya want to gag.

Tonya snorted. “So, what, they can’t hold up a, a kitten to cover their dicks?”

Jeremy blinked. “Umm, guess I never thought of that.” Then, to Amber: “You make out what he was saying?”

Amber waved a hand in the air. “Probably what they all say. They all just keep saying the same thing.” Lip readers had long deciphered their voiceless ravings from video captures.

Jeremy said, meditatively, quoting, “Stop before it’s too late. Don’t spread the satin glow.”

Tonya said, “Whatever the fuck that means.”

Jeremy looked somber. “Best guess: they’re sending us warnings so we don’t do whatever it is that’s causing some catastrophe in their time.”

Amber raised an eyebrow. “The satin glow.”

“Yeah.” Jeremy looked at her intently. “Whatever it is, three hundred years from now, it’s going to make them so desperate they’ll send these projections back to us – tens of thousands by now. Telling us to change our ways.”

Amber laughed. “What, to repent? So they’re not just pervy flashers, they’re like those loonies with the signs? ‘The end of the world is near’? Which makes sense, they’re all maniacs the way they keep screaming. What next, they’ll drool on us and ask us for spare change?”

Jeremy paused. “Maybe they are all crazy, three hundred years from now. Maybe this satin glow thing is what’s getting to them. Anyway, things might not be looking good for the species; our expiration date may be coming up fairly soon.”

Amber said, “Ahhh, I think we’re just seeing these guys ‘cause only the insane can time travel. Or else it’s a sicko joke.” She shrugged. “Things can’t be all that bad if they can transmit these holographic thingies back across frickin’ time.”

“Maybe. Though it’s hard to look at all those faces and not catch a little of their despair.” He looked at her again, morose. “Doesn’t it worry you, though? Doesn’t it make you sad? That just maybe we don’t have a future, our children’s children don’t have a future?”

Amber and Tonya looked at each other and laughed. Amber said, “’Our children’s children’? Jeremy, I know you wank off in the supply closet thinking of me, but I never thought you had dreams of having ‘our children.’ You gotta know there’s no way, right? You know what you should do? Go online at mygirlfriendfortonight.com; go see a girl who looks just like me. It’s just two or three Benjamins. You can go without comic books for a month.”

Jeremy’s face turned to stone. He was about to turn away when Stanley’s voice bellowed from across the office: “All right, people, listen up!” Heads popped up from cubicles like whack-a-moles. Stanley continued: “Everyone in the conference room, now. We have to re-edit the last segment of Ep 6. The network didn’t like the voice-overs.” He stared coldly at the blank-faced suits standing beside him. “Seems they don’t think we played up the catfight between Lizzy and Kiara enough.” He snapped his fingers several times to cut short the grumbling. “All right, people, bitch later! Let’s get moving!” He and the suits disappeared back into the conference room.

Jeremy was gone, Tonya gave Amber a wink before taking off herself. Amber gathered her tablet and notes. She paused to look at her phone. She took it and played the video, watched the time traveler’s tortured face again. “That what you were doing, perv? Trying to tell us to change? Don’t you know you can’t change the past?” She pressed Stop, then Delete. Then hurried to join the meeting.

(December 2011)

Made in Heaven

Years after, our wedding would still come up at gatherings of family and friends. People would say how wondrous it was, how imaginative; how everything unfolded like a play, how it embodied perfectly who we were as a couple.

Of course, everyone would key on different details when they recalled that early evening in September. Your parents would express their happiness that we had our wedding in the same church garden where they took their vows. My sister Elinor would rave about the strapless cobalt blue number she got to wear as part of the entourage, which she wore to critical acclaim on a number of other occasions (she would lament that she never could find another formal dress that flattered her so well). Your college roommate Alex would remember Noel’s solo guitar and vocal rendition of Nick Drake’s “Northern Sky” as we walked down the aisle (northwards, of course, towards the arch festooned with string lights and gardenias under which the minister waited). “Cool song, dudes,” he would say to us. My cousin Sally would inform us she still had the bottle of Casablanca merlot (sans contents, she would always add with a laugh) with Rumi’s “This Marriage” on the label that she took home as a wedding favor.

What everyone would remember, though, what would set off the reminiscences were the faeries – the diaphanous helium globes with LED lights inside them that you so lovingly crafted – that lit up and floated from the bushes to gasps from the crowd during the recessional (Cole Porter’s “It’s De-Lovely,” played by the Delancey wind quintet). You timed it perfectly so they would lift off and illuminate the night sky with a hundred flickering sparks just as we walked together hand in hand amongst our loved ones for the first time as husbands. Your wedding gift to me.

But while the wedding was great and I got a warm, appreciative glow whenever people complimented us for it, I still always thought to myself: Why should it have been such a surprise? We are both creative, meticulous people who leave no details unturned. The wedding was the product of careful planning and the thoughtful application of our gifts. I’m an event planner; you’re an inventor and an artist. Our talents, like us, were a marriage made in heaven.

And, really, these things always come off as memorable and perfect – even the ones that go all to pieces; even the cheesiest nuptials where the bridesmaids wear gold lamé; even, I imagine, the drive-by weddings presided by Elvis impersonators in Vegas – when the marriage is true. Even the glitches and outright disasters become part of the story, things to look back on with embarrassed mirth. And our union was felicitous from the start and continues to be good, despite the travails and challenges that are part of the bargain in even the best of marriages, despite those moments when I would gladly have strangled you, and you, I’m sure, were sorely tempted to walk out the door. I could not imagine trading this life for ten lifetimes without you and the kids.

Nevertheless, I have to confess that even though you always come up with something sweet whenever our anniversary rolls around, our wedding is not what comes to mind when I think of how we got started on this adventure of a lifetime. What I remember is that day on White Island, long before the big day; months, even, before I got around to proposing.

White Island was what the locals called it, even though it was really just a sandbar that disappeared under the waves at high tide. And when it did emerge, it never rose more than a few inches above the water. The currents sculpted it constantly, the locals said, so it was never the same shape twice. We had rowed out to it in a rented tandem kayak on a glassy sea that Sunday afternoon. At the time, we had been together just long enough to start wondering, fearfully, if this was leading to someplace serious – and the uncertainty and trepidation were starting to rub sparks between us: misunderstandings and squabbles over nothing much. I remember we had been arguing on the drive to the coast, over García Márquez, of all things. Our nerves were slightly frayed as we rowed the two miles out; we barely said two words to each other.

Our silence changed in tenor, though – quiet turning to quietude – when our kayak grated on the sand and gravel of the island, which at that point was perhaps a hundred curving feet long and twenty at its widest. We stepped ashore and, without any forethought, you wandered off in one direction and I went the other – not drifting away from each other because of our tiff, I don’t think, but just because for the moment the other had ceased to exist and we each just headed in the direction we had been facing.

I was on ground almost at level with the sea, with calm water all around me, so that if I didn’t look down it was as if I was walking on the ocean itself. There was no sound but the soft swish of tiny waves lapping the shore. When I stopped and turned to the west, it was to see the lowering sun slowly and silently igniting the sky in plumes of deep burnt orange.

I remember thinking to myself, with sorrow: This is not something you experience alone; this is something you share with someone – and it was with a start that I realized I was with someone: I was with you. I like to think you thought the same thing. At least, you turned to me from the other half of the island just as I turned to you.

We walked slowly towards each other. We met in the middle and smiled shyly at one another, as if we were meeting for the first time. We turned again to the boundless sea and the westering sun and the blazing sky. You put your arm around my waist and I put mine around yours.

After a time, without a word, we turned and walked back to the kayak, still entwined. We hopped in and pushed off. I’m sure we were both thinking we should be heading back before it got dark, but I think the deeper reason was that we did not want to overstay the moment. It had already left its mark on us, and it was best we left before it faded away. Indeed, in all the years since, we have never gone back to the island, even though we have kayaked up and down the coast many times. I think we silently agreed that to have done so would have been an imprudent attempt to recapture something that is given to you but once.

We were married that day. That day was our true wedding. That day I knew I would spend the rest of my life with you. All the rest that followed – the proposal in the glass elevator, the planning, the gnawing over the wonderful and persnickety details leading up to that lovely ceremony – was just confirmation of something that already existed, that had already been consecrated, that day on White Island. We made our nuptials as beautiful as our hands and minds could make it, but we did so in the solemn knowledge that nothing we could ever design or craft would measure up to, or be as much of a surprise or gift, as what had already been created around us, for us, between us – by a planner and artist very much greater than ourselves.

Happy Anniversary, sweetie.

(November 2011)

Dreams

She was under the surf – not drowning, but suffocated, pressed down by the water and tumbled by the waves. The water drew into itself and was a translucent, pulsating blob. Then it resolved into Ryan, at once vivid and insubstantial: for all that it was clear to her it was him on top of her on a bed of sand, she did not feel him inside her, or his skin on hers or his hot breath on her cheek; all she felt was a weight rocking her, shaking her bodily. She willed herself to fly away, saw Ryan making love to her from above – a porn scene from an overhead camera – then slowly drifted away.

She slept.

Stephanie awoke slowly, sullen and sad and not knowing why. She turned to Ryan, asleep beside her, saw his morning erection bulging his boxers, and the dream, which had been slipping away quietly, flew quickly back and played in her mind. She leapt out of bed, went to the kitchen, and started a pot of coffee, quivering with rage.

“We don’t fuck enough that you still have to have wet dreams of me?” she yelled at him the moment he appeared at the kitchen door, hearing the injustice ringing in her words but not caring. Shock, bewilderment, recognition, guilt, defiance flickered in rapid succession on his face, which finally settled into pained silence. She knew he was riffling through all the things he might say, trying to pick the words that would make things right. But what could he say that would explain, atone for, the egregious, unintentional violation? It was just a dream, Steph? I can’t control my dreams? I’m sorry? I can’t help it, baby, I’m just so hot for you? He just stood in the doorway in anguish, accepting her angry glare.

He was a good man, and he adored her. That was the tragedy of it.

She seethed through the morning shift at the bank, HR-mandated smile on her face, soft words floating sweetly out of her mouth into her customers’ ears, but her eyes blazing bright. Her phone vibrated twice during her lunch hour; she ignored it. By mid-afternoon, anger had given way, in inches, to an enormous lassitude, a somnolence as heavy as the planet. She slogged through to the end of the day. She dragged herself into her homebound bus and lowered herself with relief onto a window seat.

It had seemed a strange, inconsequential thing at first, that they began to slip into each other’s dreams when they first moved in together. One of them would describe over breakfast a dream fragment recalled, and the other, startled, would recognize it from his or her own slumberous visions from the previous night. It was peculiar, but it sort of seemed natural enough. They were in love; ergo, their dreams started to merge. Their friends, on the other hand, found the odd convergence curious and enthralling. How such a thing could happen was a source of avid speculation among them – psychological, psychic, metaphysical. Jasmina, their friend from college, a romantic, opined over dinner that it was a sign of how they truly were meant for each other, a notion Stephanie found vaguely unconvincing but that Ryan had latched onto eagerly. He had been happy for days. Indeed, he cherished the images he woke up with, the fragments of her no matter how strange and alien to him; he saw them as a gift. But the more it happened, the more she felt hemmed in by his memories distorted; the people and artifacts in his life reshaped, misshapen, made ineffable; his wishes, feelings, fears, desires given fleeting and incomprehensible forms. She felt she was wading in the muck of their co-mingled minds, and she began to resent it, then to be repulsed by it.

The lights streaming past the window of the bus were a growing burden on her eyes. The days were so short nowadays; the body felt the weight of the long nights bending it to stupefaction. She started to nod. She was in their living room – only it was the living room of Ryan’s parents’ house, the house he grew up in. Ryan was kneeling under the Christmas tree, a boy of six or seven cast in the yellow, rippling glow of the tree lights. He was blissfully, carefully removing the gift wrap from his present. Only it wasn’t Ryan, but his son, their son, and he was not taking something out of the box, but putting something in: a gift for her: a heavy, jeweled necklace. The necklace seemed to grow, its links multiplying, so that the box filled to the brim with cold, coiled, writhing metal, then overflowed. She backed away in horror.

She came to with a gasp and slammed the bus’s stop button on the side panel with her palm before she was fully awake.

In their living room, Ryan, who had given up trying to fix the glitch in his client’s website in the morning, left messages for her midday, spent the afternoon furiously cleaning their apartment, and finally fallen asleep on the couch in weary hopelessness, opened his eyes. Though he woke in the dark, disembodied, he knew with perfect clarity where he was, who he was, and what he had lost. He knew she was not coming home.

(November 2011)