SRF Heavy Industries

holiday-appropriate fiction
originally published February 1, 2007
in “Letters from Heck” at TheFootnote.net

The next big consumption holiday is coming up. I doubt you’ve prepared at all. Haven’t found the perfect Hallmark sentiment to mass-mail to your friends and relatives. Haven’t picked up the rubberstamped chocolates and sourball and ribbon candies. Haven’t bought the squirrel quarters for deep-frying or collected the traditional wild morels for the mac-and-cheese casserole or picked up a frozen quince pie from the local supermarket, no rampions and mallows in the pantry for the traditional pie-topping and garnishes. Fresh out of duck milk and duck eggs for the custard. Cornbread? Cornbread you can do. But you can’t make a whole meal for the extended family out of cornbread.

Well, you could. But you shouldn’t.

No hand-gnawed (so to speak) wooden toys to give to the youngsters. And do you have enough wood to chuck on the fire? No, you do not. Too late now, though.

And you really need the spare ramps and moonshine to leave out for… who are you fooling? For yourself to sneak down you in the predawn hours. Though bourbon would do. Bourbon you have. Moonshine is too volatile to store in porous clay jugs, as it evaporates out through the tiny pores. So you keep telling your skeptical spouse.

“What the hell are you thinking? Save some — Save me some for when the in-laws are here. I’ll need it.”

Boy, will you need it. Especially for when you’re all standing in the freezing cold, standing around the groundhog burrow, shovels in hand.

Waiting for the bastard. Waiting for the bastard to show his bashful, grumpy, sleepy, dopey, fuzzy little head.

Easy on the back swing. Remember what happened to your shoulder last year.

But still. But still. If he sees his shadow this year, you’re fucked. Best not to give him the chance.

You have less than twenty-four hours. Should you put up the WANTED posters again this year? Is that festive enough? Is there time?

Barely. On both counts.

You desperately need an early spring this year. An extended growing season’s your only chance to make up all that money you lost on last year’s Fantasy Football fiasco. But you’re not the only one who’s gonna be holding a shovel, looking for a way to make up for last year’s bad business.

Little fucker’ll never know what hit him.

And then there’s the bounty. Two or three of you may have to split it. But since RJR’s the sponsor this year, it’s bound to be fairly generous. They’ve got some catching up to do ever since Philip Morris found a politically correct way to sell nicotine to tobacco addicts — in gum and “patch” form. And let’s not forget the liquid form, at a hundred dollars per thirty milliliters, specifically for the drip feeds of hospitalized addicts too sick to go cold turkey. RJR’s and all’ve been pimping tobacco for a hundred years, telling people it’s safe, it’s good for them, puts hair on their chest; then gets in big nasty trouble for it, gets their asses sued into near oblivion… and fuckin’ Philip Morris rolls over with the rest of them, but, get this, Phillip Morris is selling tobacco to GlaxoSmithKline to sell to sick people as honest-to-God FDA-approved medicine? And Japan Tobacco has its own in-house pharmaceutical division?

Probably RJR too, now. It’s easy to lose track.

More irony in that than in your shovel, weasel-whacker. Let it go. Limber up. Their money’s as good as anyone’s.

How does this work, anyway? The groundhog sees his shadow, gets frightened, and runs like a pussy back down into his burrow taking any hope of an early spring back down there with him. But if he stays aboveground… spring starts now.

How do groundhogs divide up their territories? Is one groundhog good for, say, a whole state? A thousand miles? A hundred? Fifty? Does it matter whether it’s a boar or a sow? Do older groundhogs govern a larger area? Or is it a matter of the groundhog’s size? Do groundhogs fight each other to control larger territories?

How does that work? Are groundhogs just full of magic? If you whack their little heads off, is it like Highlander? Is the early arrival of spring “The Quickening”?

Call the County Extension Office in the morning. After the business is over. Someone has to know.

In the meanwhile, there is bourbon.

[*]

In case maybe you missed me talking about it a bunch of times, I wrote a story specifically for the DAW anthology, Zombiesque, which is available today from Amazon and other outlets.

The theme of this anthology is stories from the viewpoint of zombies, rather than just being about them. Here’s the blurb:

From a tropical resort where visitors can become temporary zombies, to a newly-made zombie determined to protect those he loves, to a cheerleader who won’t let death kick her off the team, to a zombie seeking revenge for the ancestors who died on an African slave ship — Zombiesque invites readers to take a walk on the undead side in these tales from a zombie’s point of view.

Editors: Stephen L. Antczak, James C. Bassett, Martin H. Greenberg
Contributors: Nancy A. Collins, Charles Pinion, Tim Waggoner, Richard Lee Byers, Robert Sommers, Seanan McGuire, G. K. Hayes, Jim C. Hines, Sean Taylor, Jean Rabe, Gregry Nicoll, Del Stone, Jr., S. Boyd Taylor, Laszlo Xalieri (hey, that’s me!), Nancy Holder, and Wendy Webb

Paperback, 320 pp, ISBN-10: 0756406587, ISBN-13/EAN: 978-0756406585, published 2-1-2011 by DAW

There’s a lovely review by Heather over at Errant Dreams. Here’s what she had to say about “The Confession” in particular:

Laszlo Xalieri’s “The Confession” is another of my favorite tales in this book. It’s a surreal and horrifying take on how a man might rise from the dead… or is it? As a zombie relates his tale to a man who chronicles it for him, details start to emerge that paint a picture perhaps at odds with the zombie’s tale.

Hop on over and order your copy. And don’t forget to go back and add your voice to the reviews when you’re done!

Zombiesque, from DAW, $7.99 at Amazon ($6.99 for the Kindle Edition ebook!)

[*]

This one time I was in that area of the world where the local civilization had, counter to popular belief, actually invented wheels — but used them only on toys. If they had bothered to put them on barrows, and then filled them with crops or lumber or stone, they would have spent a large percentage of their days chasing shit downhill over the crushed corpses of the people behind them on the trail and dragging it back up. This place had burros instead of wheelbarrows. Convince a burro that there will be fruit or candy at the top of the mountain, and you have defeated gravity.

To an extent. I was here to take it to the next level.

I love to fly. In airplanes, anyway, which has been my only opportunity to do so. I’m not wealthy enough to study for a pilot’s license. I doubt I have what it takes to study aviation at university, and I know I have little stomach for the military, though things might be different if we had a government that was worth taking orders from about who to kill. But I can save my money to go to places where I can hang from zip lines and spend time a little time in high places with the wind under my arms.

And I watch the birds and try not to hate them for having taken my place, even when it seems they are gloating.

I watch a squadron of birds and see it as five fingers lifted up through the surface of a still lake, so all you see are the fingers and not the hand. Watching them spin and dive, I can feel the presence of the hand. Everything that flies is part of the same creature of the heavens, poking through into the sky like the fingers through the surface of the lake. Even the fish that fly are those fingers, trailed in the water by the wind.

I know I am part of that creature. I am tortured, nailed to the ground by the whim of my larger self that governs all flight. Today I will fix that. Six of us are climbing this ridge in the Andes, a grueling climb, to assemble kites that we will strap ourselves into, two apiece, and fly down to the savanna.

My mother knows of my dreams of the sky. She is terrified that the sky will claim me — and then reject me and throw me onto the rocks. I worry about this too — but I worry more that I will have a death other than a death of birds and my god will not claim me into itself to fly into forever.

We started this climb in the dark. Two others accompanied us, nonfliers, to help with assembly and to guide the burros back down. The dawn wind is icy and eager to tug us aloft. We make good use of rocks to keep our kites from leaving early without us. Our three experienced pilots check all of the joints with wrong-sized tools and numb fingers too cold to tie strong knots. They joke and tell us that our weight hanging on the wind will tighten the knots beyond anyone’s ability to untie them, that they may have to rub the knots with sugar and let the burros gnaw through them.

I would not trust the flight if it was a certain, regimented thing. Birds play when they enter the air. They don’t fret over details. They wing it and snatch themselves into the sky.

We tie ourselves into our bright-colored plumage and pass small bottles back and forth between pilots and proteges. Whiskey freezes our lips and teeth and pours fire into our hearts. We point into the wind, one at a time, and run for the cliff. And the wind yanks us into the sky.

Under the instruction of my pilot I pull my balaclava up to expose my nose and mouth. The wind’s kiss feels like it is crushing my mouth and biting my lips off. “Your face will seek the warmer winds. Face into them and turn us with your body,” he shouts. “Birds find the updrafts by instinct, by trying to keep their little eyeballs from icing up. You do the same!”

And by trying to avoid the wind’s brutal passion, we spiral even higher. We cast shadows on condors to watch them slip to the side to keep the sun on their dark feathers. They have no concept of a predator above them, but this is the game they play with one another. Their biggest worry is that we will reach the meal before they do, monstrous beasts that we are, and eat their share.

Far to the south of us are the drawings my ancestors made that could only be visible to the sky, to the pieces of the sky god that peek through the surface into this world — pictures of sky-fellows to entice him near, pictures of prey to draw him closer.

I will see them from this vantage point someday. They may as well have drawn pornography, beautiful women in tantalizing poses, to try to draw me close. I am of the sky now, officially, and for the next few hours in a matter of undeniable fact. I am pterosaur, gliding lizard, bat, parrot, eagle, vulture — even Airbus and fighter jet.

I am of the sky. And when it is time, I will fall.

[*]