SRF Heavy Industries

This one time I looked up and saw the Earth hanging in the sky, right above the horizon, backlit by the sun, which had set a week or more ago. It was a rare opportunity to get out the telescope and see what I could of earth’s night-side lights, the aurora australis, the light-shows above storms in the south Atlantic….

Here in the lunar night, my suit was tuned to use body heat to power the electronics and help me shed just enough of the excess to keep me comfortable. I had about thirty hours of compressed oxygen, maybe a little more than half that in the CO2 scrubbers — plenty to cover my shift out here, already mostly over, plus a few hours of contemplation and personal observation of home. Invisible to me, Earth’s magnetic tail fanned out, blown back by the solar breeze and inflating like a parachute. The equipment I was checking out and cleaning was mapping the magnetic lines by following streams of protons as they spiraled in toward Earth’s poles, lit and perturbed in their travels by the lightning in storms below that the infall was, as it settled in, fueling.

I turned with my back to Earth and, as my eyes adjusted, the stars began to appear. Even with occulted earthshine lighting the lunar landscape, painting the gray with stained-glass blue shadows, I was able to see the Milky Way and make out the galactic core without blocking my view of the twilit ground. It never gets less magnificent. I captured a multishot with the full-range array — way overkill for a holiday snap. But that’s the gullet that will eventually devour us. The drain we will eventually spiral down.

Turning back around, dead center in my view of Earth was the huge mess over the eruption of Tristan da Cunha — a slow and steady and steadily worsening mess that was filling the skies with enough abrasive crap to have shut down the last three supply runs, in addition to grounding almost all of the planes on the planet. Over the course of the past two years, the ice caps had grown enough that we could tell from here. Just from the change in albedo. Volcanic gases are greenhouse fuel, though, so when all that crap settles out, assuming Tristan ever settles down, Earth will be a little more screwed without increasing the capacity of the carbon sinks.

It was gonna be a while until the next bus home. Or mail call, for that matter.

It was slow going converting dead moon to biomass, and we were doing well to not be sawing off our own legs and eating them already. Water we could make. We had a lot of really expensive metals just lying around in heaps, fantastic overkill for the printers to make us whatever shapes we needed. Silica and ceramics up to our eyeballs. Every scrap of carbon we found, we reburned and fed to the algae tanks. The salps ate it up, fat and happy.

I never thought I would miss plastic. Aerogels were fun but way too strange, even to someone living on the moon. Vacugels were even more fun. We could make big boats from them to sail the skies of Earth, anchor the bases of the elevators to the stars with neutrally buoyant masses miles above where the planes fly. Normally. When Tristan settles down.

And home. There was home, right up there. I could nearly take a running jump from here and get there in a month or so. Just swim the deeps. She would draw me to herself with open arms. It was heartbreaking.

This was the moment I got the message from base that funds were too tight to send us another bus. Too long without planes shut down too much trade, started a slow cascade that caused too much damage. We were officially out of reach. For years. Maybe two. Maybe a decade. Maybe never again.

Maintenance was my secondary. My primary was chaplain/counselor. Time to button up everything out here and head back to where I was needed.

For however long we were going to last.

[*]

This one time I was rereading a book I know I had read maybe thirty times, and I couldn’t remember what was going to happen next.

I know I’m not the world’s best reader. I couldn’t really even be called literate until the seventh grade, and that was because my grandfather put me in this summer program after the sixth grade. He came to live with us after my dad went to jail, and since he wrote stuff for a living, he wasn’t willing to put up with anyone living in the house with him who was just scraping by. We had a big fight about it, and my mom weighed in, and then there was that scare with the abandoned building on the next block over, and then I figured I owed him something for stepping in to keep me out of juvie.

I remember the meat of the argument after all these years. He said the big difference between people who are in and out of jail their whole lives and people who aren’t is whether those people can read and write well enough to save themselves. I shot back with the counter that there was no way in hell just being able to read and write would keep you from being a criminal. I said maybe it just made you a better class of criminal. Then, because my mom was there, he leaned over and whispered, “Tell me, you dumb shit: what’s wrong with that? Also, why not learn a little bit of how not to get caught? People write that shit down. Find it and read it.”

At least that’s how I remember it happening this time. I never wrote it down until now, to fix it in my head.

Grandpa told me that’s how science and technology are taking off like they are right now, and why it never had until public schools and mandatory education came along. As long as only maybe five people in a hundred could read or write, then everyone who couldn’t read had to count on those people to not be lying for their own ends when it was time to go through what people had already found out and written down.

“Words don’t change once you write’ em down,” he said. “That’s what will save us all.”

I believed him at the time, but I don’t believe that so much now.

I don’t read or write any language except English, but I know English. And I’ve picked up what Beowulf looked like when it was first written down, and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and a King James Bible, and a copy of the US Constitution, and some H.G. Wells, and some Vonnegut, and the comments section of any given YouTube page, and I’m convinced that the more stuff gets written down, the faster English itself changes, making all the stuff that’s gone before less and less comprehensible. Like science and technology, it just changes faster and faster.

And this book in front of me, this book my grandfather wrote, I read it every six months. Once on his birthday, and once on the anniversary of his death. And every damned time I read it, it’s different. It’s different to the point that the world itself is different when I get to the end.

After the fifth or sixth time I read it, it freaked me out so badly I started writing down everything that was important to me so I’d remember how things actually happened.

Not that that helped any.

You know already that when you read something, you can be confused about the meaning of the words. Some words have a bunch of different meanings. New meanings to old words crop up all the time, and old meanings fall out of use, and that doesn’t even take into consideration sarcasm, irony, and people deliberately trying to keep you confused about what they mean. Then you have to take into account a book has a hundred thousand words, or maybe twice or tree times that, and when you have to depend on context to tell you what meaning a word has, or a sentence, or a paragraph, or a chapter, you can get a cascade that changes everything, start to finish. A cascade that can sweep you along with it, and change everything downstream.

Especially if what you’re reading tells you important truths about the history of things, about your family. About yourself.

Twice a year I pick up this book. If the past few months have been horrible, I can count on this book to have a good chance of rearranging things so that things will have been better. If the past few months have been beautiful, then I pick up the book with fear and trembling. Sometimes it doesn’t change things. Sometimes it just puts things in perspective or refines them. But you never know.

Context is everything.

[*]

This one time I sat on my naked ass on a beach with black sand. The wind was cold at my back, but when it blew off the waves, it was as hot as any oven. The sun edged toward the top of the mountain at my back, promising a quick and early sunset.

A watched the waves roll in, stacking on top of each other in their rush to bring in the tide. And everything else the tide would bring.

I shivered and gasped with the chill. Then poured with sweat. Breathing was a chore.

With the sun at my back, the colors of the sea were amazing. In the blues and aquas were pinks and oranges, and the sun itself played in the waves like a school of porpoises made of lightning. The clouds in the sky were impossible colors and shapes. A textured leopard-skin shot with green shadows against an orange background. Gulls hovered in the breeze, coasting up and down and looking for snacks, their backs to the impossible beauty.

I coughed. Seawater trickled from a sinus, dripping past my numb lips. My swimsuit was bunched in my left hand. I couldn’t feel that either. My legs, also numb, were crossed under me.

In my right hand I clutched a tiny, tiny jellyfish, freshly removed from my freshly removed swimsuit.

My muscles were locked. I couldn’t move. I was locked up with cramps. Once in a while I could shiver.

Also on the beach: some humongous chunks of driftwood. What looked for all the world like most of the skeleton of a cow. I couldn’t turn to look at them now, but I saw them before I went into the water. Also on the beach: maybe twenty or thirty other people.

I desperately wanted help. Needed help. But I couldn’t move, couldn’t shout, and, apparently a stark naked woman sitting on her ass on a black sand beach, clutching her swimsuit and watching the waves come in, was something to be ignored. Or maybe treated as part of the incredible beauty of the place.

The colors were fading from the world. I was dying, and I was blending right in, wracked with pain, paralyzed, and dying with the sun. Dissolving into the sea.

As blackness approached, giant forms detached themselves from the scenery around me and approached. I was more aware of their presences than able to see them, but the two in front of me were more visible, stretching from ground to sky, black, shiny like obsidian, like the sand of this place, silhouetted against the dimming grayness behind them.

Their forms were dreamlike and harshly beautiful, like this place. Maybe they were the gods of this place, come to collect me.

Scented winds rolled down off of them. The one on my right, closest to me, brought the smell of rotting wood, of musky unnameable flowers, of the sex-life of animals. Without seeing her move, first I saw her looking out to sea, as tall as the clouds herself, crowned by an early star. Then she was facing toward me, as naked as I.

To her left was a sculpted pillar of a masculine form, so tall the setting sun lit his scalp and crowned him with fire. The wind from him smelled of brimstone, of fresh lava, of wind-eroded earth, of wood and soil on fire. To the right of the pillar-woman in front of me, right and beyond, was a wide man with his feet in the water and his head in the growing stars, smelling of the skin of living fish and of the sea.

I could sense at least two more behind me, one for each peak of the mountains, their wind smelling of fresh snow and frozen blood.

They spoke with nearly unheard unearthly rumbles underneath the roaring of the surf and the wind. Or maybe they spoke with the surf and the wind too, and the roaring of the blood in my ears.

The pain was unbearable. My breaths were too slow and too shallow. My cramps turned to convulsions and pitched me sideways. Slowly, sedately, the gods of this place knelt to receive me into themselves.

And then, over the roaring of blood and wind and wave, I heard a distant voice: “In her hand! Holy crap! Is that a sea wasp?”

“Keep her breathing! Let’s get her some help.”

[*]

This one time I was buried up to my knees in shaded, cold loam full of wriggling life, wrapped by green vines covered in tiny yellow flowers, with my face pressed into the flank of an antelope. Moments later I was face down on sunwarmed stone, one hand in a puddle of rose-scented laundry water, spitting from the taste of dry cactus bones. Then I was on my back, lying on air, adrift in a vapor of new cotton, sliced cucumbers, gin, old cigar tobacco, and rotted leather.

My grandmother’s first husband had been a perfumer. They had managed to escape Paris for Switzerland when the Germans came, though he managed to die from food poisoning within a month of their escape. They had somehow left Paris with a full trunk of bottled essences, which was possibly used as the excuse for their travel in the first place. I forget the story, but I remembered the trunk. And when my grandmother died, thirty years after the death of my father, it passed to me.

In transit the the US from Switzerland via Holland, with my father as a tiny child, the boat they traveled on encountered some rough weather. Or maybe it had even been fired upon by a submarine. No one had the story anymore. The research was beyond me. But nearly every bottle in the trunk had broken or come uncorked, and all of the essences and oils and resins had escaped into the wads of padding or into the case itself. The case was well sealed and waterproof. My grandmother had left it sealed for the most part and had opened it only once a year, and then only for the first five or six years, on the anniversary of my grandfather’s death.

And thanks to that trunk, I knew what it was like to be surrounded by snakes in a pit of damp sand, warmed by a lump of burning camphor. Or wearing a suit made of seaweed and strips of green birch with a lump of musky alabaster in my mouth.

The nose cheats. There is no other way to put it. You can be walking along, minding your own business, and then a whiff of something can yank you out of yourself and drop you forty years into your past into a recollection that has to be real just based on the strength of it, but otherwise would never have been revisited. Cinnamon-roasted almonds, diesel fumes and fish guts. Cherry blossoms raining from a snow-tainted sky. Mud from the back of a tortoise. A green-stained handful of shredded leaves and fresh bright blood from stripping a thorny vine through your fist. An elephant upwind, accompanied by fresh paint and cotton candy. Seared flesh and charcoal and lighter fluid and the smell of a young girl’s screams and tears. Dyed silk and formaldehyde and nail polish and the wrong shampoo.

But the nose cheats worse than that. It will take you to places you have never been, to impossible places that have never, that could never, exist.

I opened the trunk a whole inch and let it slip closed. And then I was in the presence of burning plastic wrapping lemon-soaked boiled eggs, put out by damp blankets of rabbit fur. Again: a mouthful of slivers of tin and dried beans and hair glued to porcelain dolls. Again: a head-to-toe shroud of lavender-laundered lace and a pillow of onionskin pages. Again: the warm glow of the inside of an old tube radio, burning dust and dessicated spiders and a hidden love note with a single pressed orchid. Again: a flurry of feathers and diaper-rash ointment and brilliant red magnolia seeds.

The fluttering light changed with every slam of the trunk lid. Outside the draperied window, the wind drove a flurry of heavy clouds past the sun, but the light brightened or darkened at the slamming of the lid, accompanying the whooshing of impossible years and incalculable, improbable distance. Distant power lines moaned and screeched at the strain on the boundaries of reality.

Breathless, finally breathless and wiping away tears, I put my head on the top of the trunk and breathed in the here-and-now scent of old wood, leather-wrapped brass hinges, old books, pipe ashes, dry-rotted quilts, death from long illness, and the discarded dander of many dozens of known and marked and dutifully buried years.

But I never forgot that escape was just on the other side of the lid.

[*]

originally published February 1, 2008
in “Letters from Heck” at TheFootnote.net

I was walking the pugs when I found a note next to the corpse of a squashed squirrel. It was in the road next to a sidewalk in my neighborhood. This is what the note read:

———-

To Whom It May Concern,

I have no remorse. I have lived a long life full of joy.

I was Chitterer Extraordinaire in the Signal Core back in The War. I was only in the Signal Core because I was too young for Infantry.

Once, back in the early nineties, I shat on Mr. T’s limo from my perch on a tree branch. If you have to ask why, then remember he once had a Saturday morning cartoon. I saw it through a living room window a couple of times. And then I waited two years for my chance.

I have taken great joy in planting acorns and poplar seeds in flowerbeds and clogged rain gutters. I have pissed on the handles of every mailbox door for twenty blocks in every direction. I have tormented all the cooped-up cats and dogs and birds in all the houses through windows and screens. If you’re local to this neighborhood, odds are I’ve watched you masturbate. And made sketches of it for that comic book thing I’ve been doing. It sells really well in Boise for some reason.

I played clarinet for an amateur Klezmer band that threatened several times to turn pro. Once I climbed up Anna Nicole Smith’s skirt while she was passed out drunk on the patio of a local restaurant — but then who hasn’t?

Once, at an outdoor music festival in Midtown, I danced onstage with Lenny Kravitz. My first wife was maimed by a schnauzer at that show, but you have to take the good with the bad.

When I was young and athletic I was a state champion at that game where you drag a paperclip or some other piece of metal scrap up a utility pole to drop on the terminal of those garbage-can-sized transformers to blow them up. I can’t hear very well anymore, and I’ve logged more air-time than the average Delta pilot, but in terms of making entire flocks of pigeons and migrating blackbirds and crows drop bomber-loads on bicyclists and pedestrians, I was truly world-class. Now I coach a little-league team. We’ve only had four fatalities this season, and that’s good.

I’ve killed four mockingbirds with my bare hands. If you know mockingbirds, you know that’s an accomplishment.

I’ve never gone a day without eating or having a warm place to sleep. Also, I have more than 3,700 grandchildren and great-grandchildren. And I never have to buy them presents or feed them at holiday gatherings.

This is why I am dead now: I have achieved all I have ever set out to achieve. I cannot think of anything more that I need to do.

There is a legend that the one who has achieved everything will be the one to stop a UPS truck with a sheer balls-out frontal assault. The fact that I am lying here right now, inert, proves that I am not the one of which the legends speak.

I must have missed something, somewhere, then. But if I did, I have no idea what. Since I have no idea what I could have achieved that I did not, I am perfectly happy.

But the UPS truck? I made it swerve. That’s good enough for me.

———-

I kept the note as a source of personal inspiration. If, in the course of eventualities, the turn comes for my existence to end, this is how I want to go. I want to at least make the truck swerve.

And I let the pugs eat the squirrel.

[*]

This one time I was out on the prairie in the department’s secondary (and therefore crappier) blind, checking the mixing board and the microphone and speaker hookups, contemplating the end of my academic career. I had shade, I had a misting fan, I had a cooler full of icewater, a five-pound bag of nutritionally balanced (for humans) trail mix, and a somewhat smaller baggie of my own special blend of herbs and spices. And the video cameras.

Prairie dogs have a language. And they talk. When we’re giving presentations and writing articles for publication, we cast it all into the most conservative language ever, falling over ourselves to back it off to “calls” and “signals” and, at the edgy, risky end, “language-like behavior.” But they effin’ talk. They have as many nouns as you think a prairie dog might need, plus a couple, and when they see something new, the first one to spot it makes up a new word. If it’s a variation on an old word, say, you start with “human,” you get words like “huge human wearing yellow” in which you can still hear “human” if you try.

The reason I was in the secondary blind is I was way off our usual sites. I didn’t want to taint one of our research towns or even a control town, though it was hard enough to keep everything pristine enough for our purposes anyway. We weren’t exactly operating in secret. We keep getting written up in popsci outlets, and every Chomsky- and Wittgenstein-quoting wannabee science tourist comes out to visit. Also our permission to study dog towns comes from whatever rancher has prairie he doesn’t have an immediate use for. Until he changes his mind. It would be different if we could convince the little bastards to stay on protected public land, but those lands, while not necessarily shrinking, keep having the mineral rights leased out from under them, and that means all of our laid-back, fun-loving prairie dogs have to come up for words for “Holy-@#^&!in-Jeez-run-it’s-a-backhoe” and “-sample-drill” and “-ground-penetrating-radar-unit” and, occasionally, “-gusher.”

I hate it when the Republicans, pockets loaded-to-dripping with oil-squeezin’s, are in charge. There. I’ve said it.

I’d been out here for a week, recording samples of everything they might say to make sure the dialect was the same as what we’d picked up about fifty miles to the south. The stuff I had already prepared before I thought maybe the usual problems were bad enough, and while I might be throwing away my career, I shouldn’t be contaminating anyone else’s work. It’s tough to listen with the ear of a prairie dog, but there were some differences. I rerecorded the calls that were different. I added a few new ones to cover the gaps. But I was just working with the basics anyway.

And then I spent maybe forty-eight hours straight in Earl’s studio, distracting him with enough weed that he’d forget to keep trying to put his hands all over me. Though when he finally clued into what I was doing on the second day, his help was invaluable. And he even kept his hands to himself.  It was Earl’s idea to mix up a rhythm track based on sample noises of wind in the grass and distant sounds of cows mooing and other animal noises and miscellaneous bits and pieces.

And this one time, out in the prairie in our secondary, crappier blind, right at the bright golden hour of sunset, I set up the cameras. And then I cranked up the amp on the portable stack and played them my poem:

[distant and soft] Deer-colored-human-with-box
[louder] Deer-colored-human-with-box
[louder] Deer-colored-human-with-box
Windstorm keep-low
Windstorm keep-low
Windstorm keep-low
All-clear! All-clear! All-clear!
Run! Run! Run! All-clear!

Rain-come water-high
Move-the-babies
Rain-come water-high
Move-the-babies
Rain-come water-high
Move-the-babies
All-clear! All-clear! All-clear!
Run! Run! Run! All-clear!

Scorpion, fast coyote, hawk-aloft [hawk cry]
Freeze!
Scorpion, fast coyote, hawk-aloft [hawk cry]
Freeze!
Scorpion, fast coyote, hawk-aloft [hawk cry]
Freeze!
All-clear! All-clear! All-clear!
Run! Run! Run! All-clear!
All-clear! All-clear! All-clear!
Run! Run! Run! All-clear!

Deer-colored-human-with-box
[softer] Deer-colored-human-with-box
[quiet and distant] Deer-colored-human-with-box

By the time I was done, there were maybe five hundred of these guys out of their burrows and blinking in the setting sun. There was a cry I was picking up on the mics, and it was pretty much just a handful of dogs barking “all-clear.” And as they started to lose interest and wander around, I played it again.

And then there was a thousand of them. Or more. And the way they would freeze and run at the right times looked like a kind of dance. And according to the mics near the burrow entrances, some of them, on the third repetition, were singing along….

And when it was over, “all-clear!” “all-clear!” “all-clear!” …

I started turning off the gear and packing it away. I left the mics and the recording gear for last — except for the video cameras, which I would have to go collect. But right before I unplugged the headphones, I heard from one distant mic:

Scorpion, fast coyote, hawk-aloft
Freeze!
All-clear! All-clear! All-clear!
Run! Run! Run! All-clear!

Maybe I’ll go back soon some Friday for Open Mic Night.

[*]

This one time I was driving to work and it was taking forever. The commute wasn’t the longest I’ve ever had, but still….

The driver’s seat of my car was the most comfortable chair I owned. The CD changer was full of good music to listen to, and my commute buddies, the cars and trucks and SUVs I drove this route with every morning, were all familiar faces, other half-awake zombies like myself, usually polite and considerate because there was really no need for a hurry. All things considered, the destination was merely, for any of us, another eight to ten hours of work. It could be worse.

In China there are rumors of traffic jams that last for days. A week or more, even. So I try not to complain.

The route held to the template of just about every commute I’ve ever had in this town or any town similar to it: subdivision to feeder road to highway to the beltway/perimeter/ring-road and then a kind of reversal, back to a highway/feeder road to a main thoroughfare to an urban cross-street to a parking garage. For the duration, we sit in our little plastic and metal boxes, relegating the actual operation of a vehicle to the same portions of our brains to which we relegate the boring and repetitive portions of our usual workday. For most of us, it all happens in a kind of trance, and emerging from the car at the end of wherever we’re going is like a butterfly emerging from a cocoon.

We get out, we yawn, we stretch, we pump blood into our atrophied limbs to reinflate them to usefulness — and then we enter another cocoon.

In the trance, the driving trance, that’s where the edits happen. The last thing you remember about where you’ve been is driving under the cacophonous symphony of upflung concrete noodles that every town calls Spaghetti Junction, then cresting the hill to where the sun behind you hits what passes for a skyline… and then you’re missing ten or fifteen minutes.

It’s not like you were actually asleep or abducted by aliens or something, but you’re missing time. And, to be frank, a bit grateful. It wasn’t necessarily time you needed to experience.

Sometimes I think about where the time goes, and if maybe I’ll ever get it back when I have a better use for it. And then there was this one time.

In my opinion, every day you have to leave your house before dawn is ruined. In the colder months, when it’s dark when you leave your house and dark when you leave work to go home, sometimes it feels like the whole day passes in a bit of a dream. Whole series of days. And if it rains on the weekend, it feels like you can lose half a month or more. Sometimes it feels rare to actually experience the passing time. So this one time, this one morning, went on forever.

My ass plopped into the seat and I started the car and … there was a sudden spike of panic because I didn’t know how long I had been sitting there, zoned out. I checked the dash clock and I was only running a minute or two behind. So I backed out of the driveway … and it seemed like it took half an hour to get out of the subdivision. My house is toward the back anyway, but I kept making the same turns onto the same roads, and the particular song the stereo was playing wasn’t my favorite, and it just kept dragging. I wasn’t nearly running late enough to be worried about the time, but I checked the clock again, and it wasn’t even two minutes after I checked the first time. Except I remembered checking the clock at least twice before. On my way out of the subdivision.

Eventually I made it to the feeder road. And then the highway. I felt half freaked out and half in some kind of fugue state. On bad days, when there’s a wreck or construction before you even get to the highway, or when there’s ice on the road, it’s taken half an hour or forty minutes, and this felt worse than that. And every time I looked at the clock, it had been four minutes. Five minutes. Eight minutes.

Going down the highway, I was finally in the commute trance, but kind of sideways. I kept thinking I’d passed intersections I was just now coming to. Again and again. And checking the clock. And eventually I heard the song on the stereo change. And eventually I made it down the ramp into Limited Access Hell. The beltway.

It felt like I was driving laps. Changing lanes to get to the one I favored, away from the ramps but out of the way of the people in the far left lane that could find a way to be late even before sun-up. Or maybe their day jobs were on the NASCAR circuit. And it was interminable. I popped the “next track” button again and again and again trying to find a song to listen to that wasn’t one I’d heard a thousand times, one that still had some remaining amount of interest in it, one that I could associate any memories with that weren’t the thousands of iterations of this thousand-mile commute. I went through all six disks in the changer before I resorted to the radio. I spun the dial all the way left to the college station that would play stuff you’ve never heard before and will likely never hear again — and it was some droning community-interest lecture.

I could feel my hair turning gray and my teeth loosening in their sockets. I expected to have to trim my nails a couple of times before I passed the next exit. And eventually I got lost in fantasies of what it would be like to shrivel and fall apart doing laps on this highway to nowhere…

And then I found myself at the top of my exit. Like I had broken through whatever barrier I’d been trapped behind. There was the white Lexus behind me that always went into the garage across the street from mine, and that sometimes I would follow most of the way home. And like an angel it escorted me through the next five traffic lights, to the right-hand turn, down the strip past the community center with the pool I’ve always meant to try, to my garage…

And I emerged from my cocoon, yawned, stretched, pumped the blood into my shriveled and atrophied limbs, grabbed my courier bag that rarely held anything more than my lunch, and … entered my other cocoon.

And I didn’t give it another thought for a months. Until the sun finally came up.

[*]

This one time I was a lizard, a gecko, running around on a stucco wall of a tiny church stalking moths and houseflies.

I don’t really have any explanation for it. Suddenly I was just a guy, though, blinking in the brightness of a tiny, tiny church on an island. The bright sun was outside and the church should have been dim, but it didn’t seem like that. I was sitting on a harsh hewn bench, blinking in the brightness, with no memories at all except that the inside of my mouth felt funny, clothes felt funny, my hands and feet felt funny, and I was hungry.

I looked up in the corner of the high ceiling and there was my old self. Eyes closed. Inert and resting, if not asleep. Below the no-longer-me gecko was what must have been the worst religious painting in the world, painted in faded tempera directly onto the plaster wall. Thematically, it looked like the Devil was having yet another very rough day. In the child-rendered lines of his face, he looked more resigned than anguished. Saint Michael’s spear was a fork giving a complicated nipple piercing. His tongue was hanging out in concentration. The Devil was like, whatever, in desperate need of coffee.

I remember not understanding the painting underneath my feet. It was just a texture of muddy colors that insects — and occasionally other geckos — would hide in. I remember the dry tackiness of my hands and feet, curling them and wiping the dust off against my ribs, licking the dust off. I missed my tail.

I was alone in the chapel. I put my hands into the front pockets of the khaki shorts I was wearing. One pocket had thirty-seven dollars and fourteen cents. US currency. Another pocket had six small stones of different textures and colors. I recognized coral. At least two different forms of lava. A large lump of olivine. All of the stones had rough holes in them, natural-looking, but hand-smoothed by years of fidgeting.

I didn’t want to go outside because it was so bright, but I could no longer eat bugs. I left the chapel, stalked quickly down the hill to a shaded thicket. I found papayas on the ground, fallen from their tree. I opened them with a sharp rock. I ate two of them, drying the juices off my hands with dust and then rubbing the dust off. I left the pits in the thicket.

When the sun moved away from the top of the sky, I followed a narrow, crumbling, asphalt-topped road toward a small group of houses. I knocked on a door and told them I just woke up in the chapel, and that I didn’t know where I came from or where I was supposed to be. The woman there let me sit in a chair on her porch and gave me some water. She went back inside to make telephone calls, and later came back out with a plate of rice and beans with some sausage in it, and a couple of tiny bananas that were orange inside, and she gave me a blanket and said I could sleep on the bench-swing until the morning. She left me a small pitcher of water. She said someone would come by in the morning to take me to town, to see a doctor.

Eating didn’t put much strength back into my muscles. I went to sleep, wondering if I would be a gecko again when I woke up. Instead, I was still me. A policeman woke me up, let me go off behind the house to pee, and then took me into a small town, where an old man I could barely understand looked me over and explained to me that I had survived a very bad fever that had damaged my brain, probably. He looked my shorts over for signs of diarrhea, shrugged, and said that was the best he could think of. He stuck me with needles and took blood. He gave me a bottle of something salty to drink, a handful of vitamins that he put into a small bottle and gave me back to the policeman.

I sat in the policeman’s office for hours while he made calls on his telephone. Eventually he told me that someone had offered me a place to stay, with food, in exchange for picking coffee cherries, and that he would give me money as well. He asked me if that was okay, and I just nodded.

Since then I have been Gecko, living a life as simple as a gecko, picking coffee cherries, eating, sleeping, and sculpting beads from stones I find. Beyond that I have nothing, and I think I am happy.

[*]

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!)

[*]