Winterpring Haiku

a plum
and its fruit flies
on Facebook

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snow patchiness
spring morning
a man sprays hair

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Brahms wandering
the house looking for
a soft spot

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housebound by snow
we hear the neighbor widow’s
vacuum sucking

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the cat wanders
a house looking for
quiet pronunciation

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watching a river
its icy mind
a sorry lover

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singles dance–
the astronomy
of repurposed moons

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that moment
in the city where no one
touches anything

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poetry
it’s prose
with the silencer on

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winter melon
death’s all about
the timing

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winter graveyard–
you reread a book
for its silences

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summer stars
anything this slow
is hard to follow

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the house thaws
spring peepers rejoice
over a divorce

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quiet rain
the window
nurses its drink

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e.r. waiting room
dirt under my fingernails
someone dancing

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missing someone
so far down the railroad tracks
they’re heat

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how to build a nest
first twig
best twig

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half seen
in the river glimpses
of bedclothes

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cold morning
fingernail dirt
scraped with a dime

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midnight 
bodies on city streets pulled by
invisible leashes

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after his divorce
people joke he’s like the man
with the invisible dog

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MISSING:
INVISIBLE DOG–a xerox
of the stiff leash and harness

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not long
after being born
footsteps

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eating an orange
someone has died
into bright flavor

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you notice too late
your body
is a cave

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a dog walks a man
without a leash
half in the ocean

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man walked
on the moon
the long leash

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over
human silhouettes
a shooting star

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winter lake
the only sound
magnet fishers

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your distance
a taste of honey
shooting star

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seeing
the shooting star
human silhouettes

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Valentine’s Day
sweeping summer’s flies
off a sill

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death row inmates
write love letters
to fame zombies

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spring minnows
drinking my reflection
find it refreshing

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looking through
my autumn reflection
a crayfish

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a crayfish
I feel I know
hard to explain

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looking through
my reflection
spring minnows

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my honey bear
plastic bottle years later
still sticky

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summer nearfar
the horizon’s honey
poured over distance

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catching crayfish
under creek rocks the graveyard
sticks up for itself

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looking through
my autumn collection
of unnameable colors

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meet my neighbors
a dead pigeon and a forty
left on the corner

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roadside bottles
thrown from cars
become little Venuses

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so-called human!
so-called human!
screams a crow

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don’t have kids
even your plastic plant
died a horrible death

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drunk after midnight
he wonders how to shoot
a potato between all its eyes

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a drunken man
screaming at the river
“I SAW YOU!”

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flooding river
all the bicycles underwater
pedal like Philip Glass

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Valentine’s Day
smile of someone
chewing bread without teeth

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winter blues
my pineal gland plays
its Greatest Hits

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state cop
writing the full moon
another ticket

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second date–
seeing his scorpion’s
black light fluorescence

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first date–
he says he doesn’t want
to smell like his house

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third date–
while you drive
he looks for Bigfoot

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fourth date–
zoo argument
about monkeys’ rights

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late apology–
rain paints
a desert

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his wrist slips
into the wrong watch
in motel darkness

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winter office flirts–
tinned sardines
lose their heads

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prayer candle–
telling the dead
where to go

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first spring day
a puppy runs through slush
of his birth alley

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candlelight vigil–
we are one
with the dead

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mother cat
sees even her stillborns
wriggling in moonlight

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drawing on the dead
moth’s wing someone says
it’s like a sin

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all is ocean
dawn’s gold dust motes on air
ebb and flow

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day after Halloween
a president’s face
in the trash

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going home
wearing another’s underwear
thank you motel darkness

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autumn moon
feeling the divorce
she wears red

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a blind man smiles
at the moon with you
out of courtesy

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refugees at sea
hold up words
they don’t know

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January first
burning incense
while the cat’s out

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something trapped
behind her eyes
an old filmstrip

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funeral’s end
crows take a few last turns
after the sun

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watching streets
turn ice growing someone
else’s beard

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in my palms
my fair share
of moonlight

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father’s war letters
to a home he only knew
from photographs

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foggy night
reading mother’s letters
to herself

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sewing a button
looking at fog
the colors in old letters

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out walking
in spring fog
cars rearrange me

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empty fog streets
traffic lights changing
nothing so much

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traffic lights change
over empty streets there shouldn’t be
a word for nothing

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spring fog viewing
there should be
no word for nothing

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August dawn walk
the river can’t stop
touching my shoes

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spring grows its hair
rarer and rarer
to hear a phone ring

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in a condemned house
a broom
beautiful with age

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Shaker double stairs–
brothers and sisters winding
down the DNA

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competing at night
with the forest’s
strange secretions

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winter moon
secretes moonlight
which secretes me

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watching winter cars
tropical fish
in a store window

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eyes closed in bed
on the phone with you
shopping together

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one hospital stay
the peonies live and die
without our help

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nurse grimaces–
another vegan
in a coma

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visiting a man
in a vegetative state–
we become radios

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you argue when I say
the peonies at the edge
are nobody’s

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morning moon
when time’s up
on a story

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the widow
carries birdseed out back
to rave reviews

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highway traffic
the ripples
in my morning

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snatched weave
burning with moonlight
on an icy street

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driving past
cemeteries only winking
at the dead

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all the movies
endings missed
New Year’s Day

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cinnabar all day
her words
mercury at night

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everywhere
I’ll never be
the rain

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asleep in vinyl
under the bed
summer grass

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barfly likes young men
spring trees
yet to grow bark

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after his death
finding pot
behind family photos

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digging dark tunnels
through darker tunnels
think we’re in love

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shiver of a loon
cry on the lake
minding no store

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September 11th
a blind man plunges his hand
in thick mud

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seeds between fathers
colors between mothers
sons between deaths

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no one
being born today
the foghorn

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words are atoms
atoms only echoes
echoes are laws

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late summer–
heard my words circle around
in a canyon

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spring cemetery
we don’t visit our family
right away

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mother’s mother’s
old scissors the dreamfare
to another country

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small earthquake–
people wake to make love
and some babies

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small earthquake
as we sleep
new countries

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moon glistens
in the spider’s down
he begs her not to shave

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he pets her
“like a downy spider”
she loves him more

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woke for a drink
and saw the weird people
who thrive in moonlight

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hot July day–
a coroner kneels to remove
gum from a corpse’s mouth

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sweltering day–
the coroner plucks gum
from a corpse’s mouth

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Buddha’s birthday–
counselors give gold star stickers
to death row inmates

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middle of nowhere
halfway home
someone’s laughter

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DON’T TELL ME
red spray paint on a wall
middle of nowhere

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not interested
in the parts of science
not about sleep

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on church pew
on court pew
the same cloud shadow

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rainy graveyard
forgetting the names
all over again

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old tombstone
remembering the moss
not the name

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an orgy–
the only name spoken
God’s

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deer are moonlight
while we sleep
and are worse things

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don’t wake him
he’s young the old fart
dog running in his sleep

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snowstorm
thanking God she makes it home
to the bar

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dusty 8-track
in the basement–
a brother’s last good year

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talking years later
about an ex
while cows eat thistles

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summer divorce–
both their names
thrown like frisbees

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after your death
dream where new teeth
rise in spring

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maybe they’re daughters
braiding her white hair
who knows

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spring day–
some things about to blossom
are fists

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she finds herself
unable to paint
without the tub’s drip

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you follow
a red maple leaf
down the creek to you

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abalone
far from the diver
the sheen

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December 24th–
the stars cattle in
warm stalls

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whistling over snow–
he sees his leg trap
holds just a leg

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out of the metro
Ezra Pound less Ezra Pound
a few seconds

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weatherman’s arm swoops
before a green screen–
a bee’s wiggle dance

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deathwatch
tiny white pumpkin
intact at New Year’s

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icicles dripping–
a blind date
with a new dentist

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a branch fallen
in the snow
homegrown crucifix

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seeking anything
to scratch its back
autumn wind

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at the trail head
cautious deer
in moonlight

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in moonlight
we are moonlight
strange footprints

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an entire village
of the dead somewhere
our radiator warmed

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waking and sleeping
my body in sync
with the radiator’s moods

photos: Pexels

Sleeping Cat

The cat sprawls on a window’s blue sill. His eyes are closed. He absorbs a distant star’s fury as something intended only for him. The sun’s fury has been refined to something soothing. Merely by distance. The window’s glass holds a reflected world, but no one is watching. Brahms plays softly somewhere in the house. Another room. Distant, subdued talking. An Intermezzo.

A child rummages quietly through a small sheaf of papers. Schoolwork’s all over her bed. The girl no longer even hears Brahms, though the recording is audible anywhere in the house. It’s been played so often these past few months, that it’s like (not) hearing one’s own breathing. One intermezzo whispers into another. The girl studies a simple division problem and her answer. She feels a strange twinge when she realizes that her answer to the math problem is the same as the answer given by every child or adult on the planet. If those people give the correct answer.

For a brief moment, she feels jealous of the children who will get the math problem wrong. For a handful of heartbeats, she feels this. At least their answer will be theirs. She doesn’t follow this thought to all the places, she senses, that it wants to travel. Maybe this is because she is eight and being wrong is still fearful. She stares at the cat in her bedroom window in his full glory of sun. She enticingly whispers his name, Mooshi, just to make him lose a bit of his heaven for a moment and look back at her. His eyes open. Seeing that she wants nothing, the cat’s eyes close again.

Distant, subdued talking. Her parents go back and forth. It’s a fraught conversation. Is it too soon? Is it right? They talk about their daughter, Elise. Their only child. Brahms goes from intermezzo to intermezzo. Alicia mentions the cat. Maybe start with the cat. Explain it to her that way. Matthew is not sure. He shakes his head as he looks out the bay window into full sun. He closes his eyes against all that brightness.

The neighbor across the street, Sue, widens a slat in her window blinds and peeks out. She sees Matthew standing in the window’s full sun, blinded. She remembers the horror all those years ago. She figures she must be the only neighbor left on that street that remembers the story. Matthew and Alicia were young then. They had everything back then.

She remembers one particular day. Sue had been walking the dog she called her little “street duster,” her Shih Tzu, and they had gone past a joyous leaf fight which had erupted as Matthew was raking leaves in the front yard with his wife and daughter. His first daughter. The one who is gone. How long has it been? Seventeen years? Eighteen? Now the couple is middle aged. There is a palimpsestic sadness showing through their new layer of happiness. Even the little girl is more sober than the first one, who was so lighthearted. Strange little girls of today, she thinks.

She remembers how she would sometimes watch the other little girl walking to school under leaves turning red and yellow in autumn. Or see her skipping home on a spring day, maybe stopping on the sidewalk to find a robin’s egg that had fallen from its nest. The miracle of the unbroken. Adorable child, she thinks. There are monsters everywhere. What those parents must have gone through, she thinks and shakes her head. She refuses to imagine, she just can’t, what the girl herself faced. It’s impossible.

Now they drive her to school. She’s never seen the child walking anywhere alone.

She remembers how she would see the child’s cat still sitting in her bedroom window. That went on years after she disappeared. That cat must have lived another seven years. At least. And then one day she saw Alicia and Matthew burying something in their backyard. Something wrapped in a blue blanket. And that was the last of the child’s great love. It had been raining that dark afternoon. It had made it even more awful to see. They had never been able to bury their child.

Matthew and Alicia decide to wait. There would be days and days of growing ahead. Let’s wait until it won’t be everything, Matthew begged. Alicia thanked him for sparing them both. But should we explain about the cat? We could show her a photograph of just the cat. A photograph of the cat, all by itself? No, said Matthew. Let the cat stay the cat. So they made dinner and joked with their daughter in that goofy way she loved and smiled upon her as they dined together. Brahms went to sleep. Later, they watched some shows with her and the child made popcorn for all three of them. They shared the warm popcorn and feelings. And then they went to bed.

*

In the night, the girl is awakened by a skittering sound.

She bolts to a sitting position in her bed. In fear, she reaches out to touch her cat for comfort. The cat is already alert, staring at the window. A finger is tapping there. A woman’s manicured finger. There is a strange woman smiling into the room from the moonlight. She is tap-tap-tapping at the child’s window like that Raven in the poem by the strange looking man with the huge forehead that she only recently learned in school.

The child wonders briefly if she should scream, but the moment for that has passed. If she has not screamed by now, a scream would be an artificial thing. A scream must just happen to be a scream. Not that the child doesn’t feel terror.

She slides out of the bed in her pajamas and walks, carefully, towards the window.

The woman is smiling at her. Why does her face look so familiar?

Through the window glass she hears smudged words: “I want to come in.”

The child couldn’t open the window even if she wanted to. It’s locked. It’s too difficult to lift. And she know there is an alarm system to protect her.

The woman smiles and smiles in the moonlight. She’s not truly all that old. Certainly not as old as her parents. Her smile is full and her lips are bright red, but her smile looks painful.

“This used to be my room,” the woman laughs. “I slept in that same bed.”

The little girl’s eyes grow large. This woman is crazy.

Elise runs to her parents now, barefoot. The shrill tocsin, the screamed alarm of their names, wakes them and they come running. Her mother catches her running body. Her father checks her bedroom.

The child tells them a story that turns them to stone.

*
Elise is at school.

“It had to be a sick prank,” Matthew nearly whispers.

Alicia doesn’t respond. She is staring at a photo of her firstborn, a young girl holding a cat.

That cat walks into the kitchen from the living room just then. Not exactly that cat. But almost that cat.

“They never found her, Matthew. They found the blood. They found all the other girls. But they never found her.”

“You’re trying to tell me you actually believe it’s her. Do you realize how crazy that sounds?”

Alicia continues to stare at the image in her palm in silence for a while longer.

“Elise’s description of the woman matched, Matthew.”

“Look, we waited years. I refuse to believe…there’s just no realistic possibility…okay, even if, one in a million, it actually was her, then why the hell would she be tapping on a window instead of ringing the front door bell and walking right in? Try to explain that part to me, okay?”

Alicia didn’t reply right away. She didn’t look up from the photograph. She felt sick in her stomach, and you could hear that stomach sickness in her voice when she finally found the strength to speak.

“Maybe because she saw herself sleeping in her own bed, Matthew. Maybe because she saw herself sleeping with her cat. Maybe because she saw she had been copied, like a traced drawing or a xeroxed document, and knew that we were sleeping in the next room. Peacefully. Maybe because we gave up. We started over. Maybe because we saw her as….replaceable…”

Her words became sobs. She struggled to speak; her legs felt weak; she felt dizzy.

“Matthew, she wanted to take our little girl. She wanted to…I can’t even bear to think of what she wanted to…what she intended to…”

She choked on her own sobbing. Her husband held her. They were no longer young.

The photograph of the girl with the cat was on a counter now. All by itself.

Nothing staring at nothing. The way photographs really are.

“It’s time to pick Elise up at school. Let’s go together.”

Alicia nodded. They went out from the kitchen into the garage and got into the sedan.

As the garage door opened automatically, they stared at the rain together in silence.

*

Not that many miles away, a young woman stood in the same cold rain. She was in a city park, staring down at the dark river below a steep bank. She thought of it heading down to the bay and wondered how many lifetimes people had stared at it and known absolutely nothing.

A homeless man approached and asked her if she wanted his coat. He was older, a relic of some native tribe or other, and seemed kind.

She shook her head no.

“No man, I’m just waiting for my sister.”

“Your sister? Is she as pretty as you?”

“Oh, she’s just as pretty as me. Actually, she’s even prettier.”

“What are you two lovely ladies going to do?”

“We’re going to go on a long trip together. A spirit journey. Get to know each other and know the world. The way things are. You know what that means, right?”

She smiled down at the dark river. As if she knew it.

He looked at the dark river and tried to see what she saw.

She disturbed him. Something about the glitter of her eyes. He remembered walking down a dark road once with a shaman who was not really a shaman, but something else.

“Yeah, ” he said, and walked away.

The Peasants

The peasants drank.

The peasants drank and talked. They pantomimed. Mostly, they pantomimed the war which had consumed them. The war had been over for years. The small tavern of shadows where they congregated, a collective shambles, was like the intermediate stomach of a ruminant where things that should not have been consumed are somehow digested.

They drank beer. They drank mostly in the evening in their village which had been destroyed by the war. They drank the alcohol made from plums. They drank alcohol made from the beautiful rye grass. They drank herbed alcohol made from the fermented juice of fruits with the bodily forms of young girls and women. They drank mead. They drank to the cemetery. They drank to the brave. They drank to the worms. They drank to the fire and the fire’s children.

They got insanely drunk and talked about the village war dead. Someone would talk about A. An old man would get drunk and would act out A.’s death for the rest of the bar. A. had not answered a certain officer of the occupying army correctly. He had stood before an officer of the army which had owned their village for the duration of the war and answered incorrectly. He had answered as if it was a performance. He figured the officer was giving a performance in that funny costume of his. A. had wanted to perform too. He had been very young, the village comedian. He had all the playfulness and natural comic instincts of a puppy. He had been promptly taken to a nearby barn and shot. The entire village had watched.

A’s pantomimer would tell the story of A. over and over, night after night, year after year. Was the story a joke? It was told in the tone one tells a joke, with broad smiles all around. The smiles of the drunks remembered the fate of A. and his comical words spoken into the face of the officer. Certainly, the shooting of A. was told as a sort of punchline. The voice telling the story got louder during this part and then everyone guffawed. “Shot dead in that barn.” “What was he, seventeen? Eighteen?” “Sixteen, I think,” an old woman chimes in. Laughter follows.

But what sort of laughter is it? Could it be compared to the laughter of schoolchildren on the playground? Or is it a rarer sort of laughter? The story would not change. Only the storyteller would change, his face becoming wizened like a dried apple, his teeth less, his teeth uglier each year. And the faces of those who listened to this story would deteriorate along with the storyteller’s face, as if in a secret sympathy.

So the bar collected drunks that would pantomime the various war dead of the village. Each dead person had a stand-in. The stories of very young children who had been murdered by the war were not told. Their stories must have gone somewhere else to be told, somewhere even darker.

The old lush who told B.’s story down the years droned on and on. She would sit in a dark corner of the bar where she could see everyone. She knew who everyone was, what everyone was. People no longer talked about who had been good in the war, who had been bad. It was the stories that needed to be pantomimed, not morality. People are story magnets. And drunks are the most magnetic old story collectors. When you’re drunk, you need a rope. And stories are like ropes you can pull yourself along. Any old story with a barb in it will do for thinking, will do the thinking for an old drunk.

The old lush would tell how B., a simple mender of shoes, had made bombs. He was attempting heroism. But he blew himself up before he had a chance to place those bombs under the occupiers’ vehicles. He blew himself up in his own barn. He blew himself up, but also a pregnant horse. That was the sockdologer for B.’s story. The drunks had even named a cocktail after B. It was called “The Pregnant Horse.”

It was drunk on the darkest nights, on the heels of the tragedies with the most teeth. Maybe it was an amulet. The younger citizens who frequented the bar, who were born after the war, had no idea what the nightmarish denizens were talking about when they toasted each other with the memory of this horse exploded in time immemorial.

And so on and so on. C.’s pantomimer recalled that young woman who had slept with the enemy for favors and was later found hanging from a large branch over the river with an ill-gotten couture bag around her neck.

D.’s story was that of an old woman who had been forced to kneel on her family’s soil with a pistol pressed to her head. She had been given the choice to spare her beloved pig or herself. She had chosen to save the pig, so the trigger was pulled. The pig was shot immediately afterwards, of course.

E. had been an educated man, the villager with the most books, who had tried to lecture the occupiers in front of his fellow villagers. He had been tied to a chair in his study and burned with his books. The drunk assigned to tell E.’s story would make the flames with his hands and his arms. He would become the flames as he laughed uproariously, a strange glitter in his eyes. The alcohol would feed the story, down at the roots, would feed all the stories.

The young people were trying to reclaim the tavern for their generation. It became easier with the years, as the bodies of those who remembered the war, its pantomimers, drifted off to the village cemetery. The stories went quiet, the stories went dark. Rain and snow fell on the cemetery. The names on the tombstones became fainter.

These young ones, who were interested in making love and making money, had no interest in these old stories. They would be polite. But they could not laugh at these stories. They would stare stony-eyed at the punchlines. You had to have been there to get it. They understood that these wizened creatures had become these stories and that this tavern was their home. They mostly tolerated them.

On the rare occasion that one of the younger drunks would go after one of the older drunks, the older drunks would form a posse and grab bottles. The young man would usually back down once he saw all the missing teeth of his adversaries and how even the old women were ready to draw blood.

The one all the old-timers wondered about was M. He had lived just outside the village. Nobody knew what happened to him or how he had behaved during the war. He just disappeared. His little house was still there but empty after the war. Nobody had even thought to check on him. Was he young? Some said yes, some no. Was he old? Some said yes, some no. Was he crazy? A monk? Did he have a family? Certainly, he did not or they would have been remembered. He must have been solitary.

But what was he? The only people who might have known were dead. If anyone had ever known. The best people could do was a story of a story of a story about M. that was usually soon discounted as hearsay.

M.’s story was the one story that changed constantly. All the other stories remained the same. M. was a community project, the one story in which the storytellers (and they all took turns telling M.’s story) could use their imaginations. They could embroider, they could reinvent. Some nights everyone was sure M. was a villain. He must have been in the enemy pay, in the enemy headquarters, “giving them information on all of us.”

Other times, he was off doing something heroic to save the village. Certainly he existed. He wasn’t fictional. Though he existed now as a series of permutating fictions. He had been real.

You could still see his house at the edge of the village, decaying. Its little roof had turned to moss long ago and had begun to cave in. All of the furniture had been taken by scavengers. Birds liked this little house now. It had become a bird hostel, a come-and-go-as-you-please aviary. The drunks were mystified. The tongues returned and returned to the missing story the way a tongue returns and returns to a missing tooth.

Maybe M. had been a saint and preached to the birds like Asisi. Maybe the birds were the souls of the dead villagers and M. had left this rainy house to them, that they might perch in its windows and watch the wild grasses and wildflowers of the summer fields nod in the wind outside their beloved village.

So the old-timers prattled on, such nonsense that rankled the ears of the young lovers and businessmen sharing the tavern with them. So long after the war, everyone still had magical hopes. And magical hopes are only chatter, the young men and women thought.

When the last old drunk found himself the only person in the bar who remembered the war, to whom could he tell his story?

He was like the last exemplar of a lumbering species now going extinct, trapped in a zoo. The others were outside his cage, looking in. Look at those strange eyes in the creature‘’s head.’“Do you think it guesses it’s the very last one?” a young woman would whisper to a young man. “And the smell!” a student would intone, elbowing his buddy and shaking his head.
In the corner, the old man faced outwards, drinking himself deeper and deeper into the only story left to him, since he could no longer speak, the conundrum that burned inside him almost as ardently as youth itself: “But what really happened to M.?”

Brainbox

The latest big threat to humankind’s existence, the johnny-come-lately of epidemics, had first entered the country’s social life in an innocent form. It all began with a popular marital aid sold in most big box stores, the DuoDex. Many considered it a novelty toy when it debuted. Early reviews were chirpily optimistic. Here was a new toy aimed at adults. Better yet, it was a bedroom toy you could actually talk about in polite company.


At the product’s first media flush of success, once it was clear the product would be huge, it became, of course, a target. Some reviewers turned cynical, just because being cynical is lucrative and eye-catching work. And then the expected negative reviews and invidious comparisons were made by would-be competitors. The device was sometimes lumped in with the Ouija board or fortunetelling apps by detractors looking to debunk for likes.


But husbands and wives, husbands and husbands, and wives and wives, or a significant number of them anyway, became closer through using the DuoDex. Sex lives improved. (The device was often nicknamed the DuoSex.) The divorce rate actually moved in the opposite direction, towards matrimonial cohesion, for the first time in several generations.


The unhappy couples who had tried this therapy and still got divorced would sometimes disparage the device. Of course, the manufacturers inserted a CYA block of legalese in the enclosed instructions indicating that the DuoDex was intended to be used “for recreational purposes only” and that under no circumstances could the manufacturer be held accountable for the fate of any relationship. In other words, your results may vary. Soon it was the number one Christmas gift for adults. For several years running.


The DuoDex consisted of two linked neural network “head sleeves” meant to be worn only when two individuals intended to sleep next to one another. Each sleeve was a bunch of plastic cords hanging, octopoid-style, from a plastic disc which sat on the top of the head. The electrodes at the end of each cord attached to various points on the human skull effortlessly, without adhesive material. Only a handful of people outside of the manufacturing company (and few within it) knew how this aspect of the device worked. Like much else relating to the DuoDex, this strange adhesiveness was a proprietary secret.


However, the DuoDex had been approved by the Department of Homeland Security for use by mentally well-adjusted adults. The FDA had once been the arbiter of what was safe for the human brain. But with the advent of new technologies capable of affecting neurochemistry and human thought, and potentially affecting national security, there had been a restructuring of such oversight within the government.


The device did not function when worn by waking brains. Attempting to neuro-link during waking hours could result in tremendous migraine-like headaches lasting for days. The device had not been approved for use by children. Of course, kids would get into their parents’ privacy drawers and dabble. That misuse alone had sparked a firestorm of talk show arguments between the proponents of civil liberties and the proponents of governmental parenting.


The device worked by setting up a neural circuit between two brains. The device was most active during R.E.M. dream states. The most the manufacturer, Elkcogito, would say about how the device worked its magic was that the DuoDex could siphon fear from one human brain and then circulate this fear through the linked brain, which largely dissipated it. Joy, the company explained, could also be redistributed, shared. If one partner or spouse was unhappy, the happier partner could share his or her happiness effortlessly. Some psychologists decried this process as a “cheat,” but then some psychologists were losing a lot of money. Empty chairs sat in offices where marriage counseling and relationship counseling had been a booming business, a fatted cash cow.


The speculation was that Duodex worked by controlling the neurochemistry of the brain by triggering neurotransmitters. Clearly EEG, brainwave-reading functionality was also present in the device. But this is stating the obvious. It was the particulars of the design that resisted analysis, that was the uncrackable code. There were endless websites and videos purporting to show how the device actually worked. But the nanotechnology of the DuoDex was of a new order. Few individuals or even firms had the technology needed to really break down the design. Patent wars loomed on the horizon for the manufacturer. Several Japanese companies had alleged blatant theft. That much had already leaked into the news cycles.


People shared their DuoDex experiences with friends, family, clergy, talk shows, everywhere people normally talked about relationships. But there was a mystification factor in this talk. People couldn’t articulate how they felt changed by using the device. They could only say that things were better, that they got along better with their spouses or partners. It used to take a second honeymoon to Acapulco or Paris to achieve the magic the Duodex could work, inexpensively, in usually under a month. And it could be repeated endlessly, without additional expense, unlike a third or fourth honeymoon. Couples would talk about feeling happier, more hopeful, less full of fear. Younger, recharged, erotically nimble again. So much energy, positive and negative, lurked in dreams. That much was clear. And it could be harnessed and redistributed. Hurrah for the tech gods.


And then the nightmares started.


Hackers began toying with the device, reverse-engineering it and changing its capabilities. Junkies were soon carrying these retooled Dexes around from motel to motel. They were getting high off captive brains. Seriously damaged people were being found tied down to motel beds all across the world. These victims were sometimes unfixable. These individuals were referred to as iced or icees. Their brains were now dangerous places. They were invariably violent to themselves or others. Complete sedation followed by institutionalization was the only option. Sometimes they recovered. Sometimes. The divorce rate had gone down, true, but now the homicide rate went through the roof. The DuoDex was recalled. The lawsuits began.


But it’s not so easy to recall a technology that has become a pandemic. In fact, it’s nearly impossible. It’s like closing Pandora’s box after the dragons have flown.


Sykes was a detective in the era of the Dexes. He rolled with the punches but he found himself single after enough of those punches. Even his kids rarely wanted to powwow with dad. Maybe it was the long silences. Sykes had started living deep in his head. He was nearly always turning the gruesome facts of some Dex case over and over in his head like so many worry stones.


You can only be called out to so many crime scenes in the middle of the night before even a DuoDex won’t fix your marriage. And, apparently, Sykes’ brain was now too dark from his work. The first time they tried it, his wife refused to neuro-link with him ever again after a month. She said his brain gave hers the heebie-jeebies. Big fat surprise, he thought. She was happily remarried to a bearded guy who taught high school French and looked like a model who was aging very well.


Sykes was used by now to being called out at 3 a.m. to stand on a windy highway bridge where one of the iced had plummeted into the dark bay below. Sometimes he would look down into that black water and think of the sleepless sharks under that choppy surface as his brothers. Weren’t they “on-call” all the time too? Sykes figured it was his spirit-animal.


It took years of the job to make Sykes into Sykes. But the undoing of Sykes didn’t take long. It took less than a week.


Sykes had been allowed to sleep all night for once. The call came in as he was driving to the office. He was told to divert to the Sunrise Motel down along the bay. He pulled into the lot when the sky was all pink and coral and yellow behind the cheap motel. What a great day to wake up dead in a motel, te detective thought. It was a dive. Tourists were warned to stay away. The reviews of the motel online frequently alluded to bloodstains, strange smells, and more than one mentioned finding a body. Sykes had read these before. One pithy review said it best: “Dex Trap, Death Trap!!!”


It was a girl. Lying in the motel room. It just had to be a young girl, didn’t it? He had a daughter about that age. She had, like slightly more than half of the iced do, killed herself. Someone had tied her to the motel bed, drained all the positive feelings from her brain, and left her there, a screaming wilderness of psychic pain. A fried egg. She had broken out of the restraints, smashed the large mirror over the bedraggled bureau, and gone to town on herself with the shards.


The girl had been pronounced dead on the scene. But just as Sykes was commenting on how the bureau appeared to have been attacked by a posse of beavers, the body on the bed began moving its limbs in the most unearthly fashion.


“Coroner’s flubbed it again!” Sykes shouted as he and several officers who had been milling about the room threw themselves on the body, which had begun to thrash.


She was awake now and fully iced. Her pitiful screams began. Like one of the worst scenes in The Exorcist.


“Brainbox!” Sykes bellowed towards the open door of the motel room.


A few officers came running in, one of them holding what looked like a crash test dummy’s head with wires dangling from it. Sykes and several other young men and one middle-aged woman held the girl down and talked to her as Officer Lopez deftly connected the wires from the brainbox to the girl’s skull. Sykes himself threw the switch on the brainbox and the flat pseudo-eyes on the device glowed red. The brainbox was draining the woman’s fear. Within minutes, she began to thrash much less and the E.M.T.s on the scene began tending her wounds. She had, miraculously, missed the major arteries. The blood around the motel room was mostly body and hand transfer.


The young woman left by ambulance. In time, everyone left. Off to other nightmare calls before most citizens had finished their breakfast. Sykes was the last one left on the scene. He was guarding the scene until the techs arrived. The girl would survive. Today was a “win.” Quotes necessary. Where was the bastard who did this to her?


After speaking the evidentiary notes he needed for his report into his phone, and while he was waiting for the evidence techs to arrive, Sykes noted that the disconnected brainbox had been left on the carpet next to the bed. He used one gloved hand to pick it up by the handle and carried it to his car, where he deposited it in a sterile bag. All it takes is a moment’s inattention, and that thing could be boosted and end up on the black market. There’s no telling what sort of misuse the evil bastards could find for that.


There was no doubt the brainboxes could be reverse-engineered to kill. But mostly they were used to achieve unprecedented highs. Sometimes this produced happiness zombies who would walk obliviously into busy traffic. Sometimes the hapzombs would step off the upper floors of parking garages, sure they could walk on air. Or at least that’s what people speculated they were thinking, who knows. They’d often be found, the corpses, with big smiles on their faces. They were called leerers too. For this reason.


Sykes would never have guessed that this day was the day of his undoing. Because, so far, it had been business as usual. As bloody as it was.


Sykes was returning to the precinct when he got the inkling that he had left his stove top on after making eggs just before leaving for work. Why didn’t he have a remote system control for this appliance? He chastised himself. He had failed to log the stove on when he had set up his apartment network. So he decided he would make a quick stop back at his apartment.


He decided to err on the side of caution and carried the brainbox up the small flight of stairs to his front door. There really wasn’t a mess in the bag. There was only a smudge of blood on the head. If the brainbox was stolen out of his vehicle, the repercussions would be enormous, there would be hell and then some to pay.


The oven had been off, after all.


Sykes was preparing to leave his apartment, he was almost out the door, when he got the call that flattened him. His wife’s voice, softer than he had heard it in years. The tears in her voice. Their son had been found dead two hours earlier. It was an icing incident. Sykes talked less than five minutes with her. She worried when he wanted to hang up. She knew he was alone. He told her it would be alright.


He called the office and told them he would not be in. He shot his notes from the Sunrise Motel over to his colleague. He looked up the number of the coroner who would have jurisdiction. He imagined his voice coming out of a speaker in the same building where his son’s body must be lying on a cold gurney. He called, talked to several of the administrative staff who put him on hold several times, and then eventually he spoke with the coroner, who was kind but reminded Sykes of her professional obligations.


She didn’t want to give him the details of his son’s death. He pushed. She pushed, gently, back. She begged him to surround himself with family or friends. She really had to go. He thanked her and hung up.


Sykes called the police department with jurisdiction next. The detective he ended up speaking with hadn’t even seen the paperwork yet. He didn’t want to be a hard ass, since he felt he was talking with a brother of sorts, but again there was nothing to share. Not yet. And again, professionalism dictated discretion. He knew Sykes knew that. But he reminded him. He, too, urged Sykes to seek out someone he could talk with.


Sykes did what he would never ordinarily do. He drank the rest of the day and popped a handful of pills. OTC, yeah, but still crazy stupid, he knew. He lay in bed and looked at photos of Rowan on his phone. All ages of Rowan.


It was so much worse because they hadn’t spoken in over a year. He replayed that conversation and reminded himself that his kid didn’t hate him. He never hated his dad. He just couldn’t have any good conversations with his father. And now Sykes went into the dark sting of realizing that it was his fault. He was the one who could have changed that. But he had always figured there would be time. Why wouldn’t there be? And then he remembered what he did for a living, what he saw every day, and he felt stupid. He was the stupidest P.O.S. on the planet.


Q: How drunk does a detective have to be to illegally neuro-link with one of the department’s brainboxes?


A: Very fucking drunk, indeed.


He set the crash test dummy head on the pillow next to him, where nobody ever slept. Maybe a head with an interesting face would rest there for a few hours and show him its ecstasy, eyes rolling back into the head, now and again, for which he was always hugely grateful.


But nobody slept there all night. Ever.


Not since the divorce.


Sykes put the head sleeve on, he flipped the switch on the brainbox, and the red featureless eyes lit up. The whiskey and pills synergistically did their work, and Sykes was gone in minutes.


He was dreaming. He was with his son at the beach, lifting him over higher and higher waves. His boy was eight. His wife sat on a towel on the sand, her lovely legs shining. It was all good. It was alright. It was all good.


And then he heard a woman’s voice calling him. Terrified voice. Behind him. Even as Sykes held his son up above the roaring waves of the surf, he felt the boy turn into white static, dissolve. He was holding nothing. Empty air. He turned back to the beach and all the bodies were dissolving, like a filmstrip image melting on a superheated projector.


He sat on dream sand and listened as the woman told him how she was trapped. Inside the brainbox. She whimpered her story. Sykes sat on the sand in a dark night now. Each fist held a fistful of sand. Tightly. The voice told him she had made mistakes. She had run away from home, she had fallen in with icers. She had been used as a dupe to lure young men into motels where their thoughts had been drained into bootleg brainboxes. Now she found herself in the worst sort of hell. She existed. But only in the brainbox.


“This is just a nightmare,” Sykes intoned. He was clearly having a bad trip. Even in his dream, he was partially awake. Sykes was a lucid dreamer.


But she gave him her name. She begged him to look it up. She begged him to release him, to destroy the brainbox. If there was no way to come back. Sykes woke up yanking the wires from his skull.


He had no idea how long he had been out. But night was in the window.


He went online and researched the name she had given him, Samantha Radic. There were several newspapers in New Jersey which had covered the Dex bust. It was reported that Radic had been discovered dead in a Motel 6 in Atlantic City. Several icers had been taken into custody.


Her name also came up in an article in a fringe, underground newspaper that alleged that Samantha Radic was one of a number of “allegedly dead” individuals who had been reported as having contacted living people while they were hooked up to resuscitation brainboxes. Sometimes the brainboxes were circulated around between police departments, after receiving the regular servicing, for example.


There was an editorial in this largely anti-government online rag stating that there was evidence “out there” indicating that living human brains were actually encased in the brainboxes. Or else, they were AI simulations of actual human brains. The editorialist hedged his bet.


This bothered Sykes tremendously.


Everyone knew that the brainboxes were impervious to x-rays and impossible to open. If you tampered too much with them, they were designed to undergo a sort of meltdown which destroyed the contents. Intense heat was generated within. Sykes had seen underground types with terrible burns on their hands from monkeying around with a brainbox that had hotboxed on them. Word on the street was that hackers had recruited specialists who could crack the code and open the things.


Sykes called his ex after scanning several messages that had come in while he slept, and they wept into the abyss of the past in a longer conversation this time. Funeral details were already set. Sykes told her he would fly out the day before. He begged her to have his daughter call him as soon as possible. She promised. They hung up.


Sykes was showering and crying into the noise of the shower. He cried so long his throat began to hurt.


While he was toweling off, he smelled something burning.


He jogged down the padded carpet to his bedroom and saw his bed was scorched. A smoldering glow in the darkness came from his quilt. The brainbox, which he had placed back in its plastic bag, had superheated and burned through it plastic, producing the acrid smell which had brought him running. He was able to extinguish the burgeoning quilt fire with just his wet towel. He carried the entire quilt, rolled-up, into the bathroom, and threw it into the shower which he turned on full. He didn’t need his fire extinguisher, after all.


He had rolled the brainbox onto the sheets below the quilt where it was busy starting a new scorch. He knew he had to roll the still superheated brainbox onto something that wasn’t flammable. He grabbed a pan from his kitchen and used the wet towel to push it onto that, down on the floor next to the bed.


Sykes knew this wasn’t a coincidence.


Someone knew he had made certain queries. They had to know.


They had remotely triggered the brainbox to self-destruct.


He wondered darkly about the fate of Samantha Radic.


Her true fate. Not the one the newspapers had assigned her.


He intended to find out.

Reviews of Planet Earth on Extragalactic Yelp

One Star. Visited this three billion years ago and loved the beaches. Just happened to be in the Galaxy again, so thought I would swing by. Place is unrecognizable. Beaches are now overrun with bipedal sand fleas calling themselves humans. If your idea of a good time is creatures that never stop producing sound waves from openings in their gastrointestinal tract, then have at it. Disgusting spectacle. Yet another fine planet ruined by evolution.


Four Stars. We love this underrated little planet. Our family rarely goes anal probing anywhere else. Gave it one less star because the inhabitants you probe sometimes go on talk shows afterwards.


Three Stars. If you collect humans like me, you probably know the best hunting ground, tentacles down, is The Bermuda Triangle. I could take or leave the rest of the planet.


Two Stars. They. Actually. Eat. Vegetables. And. Fruit. They seem totally unable to hear the screams of the apple they devour under the limbs of its screaming mother. That much being said, I did enjoy the National Parks System.


Five Stars. When you need 3,4,4,5-tetramethylcyclohexa-2,5-dienone and don’t want to pay a lot for that 3,4,4,5-tetramethylcyclohexa-2,5-dienone, earth is a great place to just go on stealth mode and take all the 3,4,4,5-tetramethylcyclohexa-2,5-dienone you want. Shoplifters of the Universe, Unite and Take Over.


One Star. Warning: the dominant species is stalkerish. They will pursue you like paparazzi. Flash flash flash. Video-happy saucer chasers. Absolutely no privacy whatsoever. If I could give it negative five stars, I would. Avoid.


Two Stars. Loved it when it had dinosaurs. They were delicious. The new dominant species just tastes too over-medicated for my liking.


Three and a Half Stars. First, a confession. I ended up on this planet by mistake. I was supposed to be meeting a Karathuzian for a blind date on Shortender-19, but entered the wrong coordinates in my Burstalizer and found myself on a date with a Kardashian on Earth. Even though this being had seventeen less appendages than I’m accustomed to my dates having, I went with the experience (okay, I’ll confess I hit it). I won’t be returning though. Nothing against the earthling. It was more the maternal unit that made me want to never see the planet again.


One Star. I learned human languages, traversed 784 light years, and assumed a camouflage of human form to look at a Prius which, the owner assured me, had only 20,000 miles on it. Turns out there was nearly twice that on the odometer and the upholstery smelled like a dead crackhead in a dumpster. If anyone mentions Carfax, they’re getting vaporized. Never again, Earth. Never again.


Five Stars. First, in the name of full disclosure: I work intergalactically with severely developmentally-challenged species for a living, so I’m probably partial to poor little space cases like the dominant species of Earth. I want to just pick up those bloodthirsty little warmongers and hug them. They really seem to have no clue that when other civilizations look at them, they see a species that could never even make the intergalactic junior varsity, riding a spherical short bus through space. They keep sending those messages out into the stars through active SETI. It’s probably for the best that they don’t know how every single extraterrestrial culture considers their pleas for attention a joke. It’s like a kindergartner asking his senior sister’s classmate friend why he can’t just be her date to the prom? Not gonna happen, kid. Contact us when you’re older. When I fly through, it takes everything in my power to keep from giving a few of them remedial physics. But we’re not allowed to mess with “special needs civilizations” at this low a level of consciousness, per the Quamerthian Accords. This planet might meet the minimum score to receive remedial education in a few dozen millennia. If luck’s on their side. In the meantime, five stars for promise, and in the hope that it balances out some of the harsher reviews this little planet is bound to receive. I always cheer for the underspecies.


One and a Half Stars. A planet where the creatures in charge just don’t seem to be able to mind their own beeswax. As a bee, I take particular offense at that. Also, it’s a planet of honey thieves. I gave the planet a small bump-up for the pretty flowers, which I enjoyed (and some of which I trans-planeted).


One Star. Seriously, is anyone still doing the Milky Way Galaxy in Year 13, 898, 532, 432? It’s so 12 billion-esque.


Four Stars. We only go there when we’re looking for pets. They’re a good source. Here’s a word of practical advice: if you do pick up human pets there, try to get two at a time. They tend to get lonely. It’s best to ask them if they like to play with ones that have different parts from them or the same parts. It really makes the difference between a happy pet and one that won’t play and sulks all the time. When they get old, you can just clone them. We’re on our fourteenth iteration of “Jim” and “Kurt” right now. They’re so cute together. I don’t know what our larvae would do without them. Teaches the littles responsibility too, caring for the critters. Happy Hunting!

Bush Family Legacy: Prescott Bush and the Nazis

"The ties between Hitler's Nazis and American businessmen such as Henry Ford, Averell Harriman, and Senator Prescott Bush, the father of George HW Bush, have long been cited in lawsuits filed by Holocaust survivors seeking compensation for their suffering. The late Senator Prescott Bush's German assets were seized in 1942 by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt under the Trading with the Enemy Act, which also carried prison penalties which Bush escaped. Historical scholarship over the last decade shows that Bush was deeply enmeshed in business which was vital to the rise of Nazi Germany, and almost certainly knew that his profits were driven by slave labor."

That's not even the worst of it. Prescott Bush was probably fully behind a coup to overthrow Roosevelt and install a fascist dictatorship in America. Read the article linked below for more information and documentation.

Read more: http://www.digitaljournal.com/news/world/bush-grandpa-traded-with-enemy-for-3-years-before-assets-seized/article/424715#ixzz5bPFbFhvr

Did a British Royal Instigate the Bombing of England?

"Dr Karina Urbach of the Institute of Historical Research at the University of London (and author of book Go-Betweens for Hitler) uncovered evidence of just how deep the duke’s collusion with the Nazis went. She details a report from June 25, 1940 by Spanish diplomat and friend of the duke Don Javier Bermejillo of a conversation where Edward went so far as to argue that the bombing of England could bring WWII to an end. Dr Urbach claims the report was passed on to Spain’s military dictator, General Francisco Franco, and then to Germany. Britain was first bombed by the Germans on July 10, 1940."

I was reading about the horrible Nazi-wannabe and spy Coco Chanel, her atrocious behavior before, during and after World War II. 

Coco Chanel was a snake. I don't care how hard her childhood was. She was a monster. There are so many French artists whose bravery during the Nazi occupation demands total respect. Chanel was the exact opposite of those people. She wasn't even brave in her convictions. She played whatever side she felt could benefit her most. As the American forces overran France, she left a sign in her shop window stating that Chanel perfume was free to all G.I.s. Yeah, right. And probably most people realize by now that all those witty maxims attributed to this traitor and vicious anti-Semite were actually authored by poet Pierre Reverdy. If you read Chanel's letters, you'll discover she had no capacity for wit. 

Reading about Chanel led to me reading the above indictment of Edward VIII in an article on Nazi sympathizers among the British Royals. 

Churchill might have been responsible for getting Coco Chanel off the hook scot-free after the war. This might have been because of compromising knowledge she had about Nazi sympathizers in the British government.