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.

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!

Opercula

The teachers made a strong effort to create a respectful silence around me. They knew my classmates would talk. Would whisper. These teachers, the braver ones anyway, gave little speeches occasionally. They talked about “delayed development” and “transgenic differences.” How not everyone’s body will bloom at the same pace. They would talk about famous late-bloomers. Great, inspirational success stories. Sometimes though, they confessed, and they would always admit this last part almost under their breath, a strong voice collapsing into a whisper, a person just doesn’t bloom at all.

They were trying to ward off meanness. I get it. But meanness (and trust me, I’ve encountered it) happens outside of the gaze and earshot of teachers. Publicly, everyone at school’s a perfect angel, nodding along with the sermon. The worst offenders usually applaud the preacher.

I used to sit in class and daydream. Instead of focusing on what numerical identity the mysterious Secret Agent x had decided to assume today in algebra class, I would steal peeks at my blossoming classmates. I would notice Oleanna’s branches, the recent growth spurts on both sides of her body. They were long and luxurious, to her knees. Once again, she would be in season. She would bring forth the loveliest fruit. Just look at our yearbook if you don’t believe me.

She was probably the most fertile girl in our school. And I always ended up sitting near her. She wasn’t mean at all. Not publicly anyway. But still. Some days I hated her. Those were usually the days when I would catch a peripheral glimpse of her picking one of her juicy dark berries and tossing it back through her perfectly glossed lips. She knew how many guys and girls were transfixed in those moments when she would taste herself and then smile her mysterious Mona Lisa smile. Other days, I didn’t hate her at all. I admitted the truth to myself. I just wanted what she had.

Of course, my parents had taken me to the usual specialists. My siblings, my younger brother, my older sister, were both branched, and my older sister had never had any problem bear fruit. I was happy for them. My older sister wasn’t nasty about it at all. She’s even tried to help me, massaging my opercula. And my mother gave me the usual liquid supplements which are supposed to help the growth-challenged. We tried everything on the market.

The specialist doctors did all the usual scans. They said everything was in the right place. They did some exploratory visualization with fiber optics and newer technologies and then even gave me a dose of nano-bots to assist in my germination. They didn’t help at all. They told my parents it could come right at any time. Nobody knew why I hadn’t even been able to bring forth one branch from a single one of the many gill-like openings on either side of my body. I was a barren waste. My mother and father both promised they would never put me through the agony of transplantation. You could always tell when someone had transplants. There were horrible stories about what happened when the body rejected the branches. Sometimes they grew in the wrong direction, into the body instead of the world. Rumors abounded that those branches came from cadavers. Those were the fruits of the dead. Yuck. In the end, the medical consensus, the recommended course of action? Home schooling. Hide her.

I began to stay in the house all the time. I joined some support groups but this was on my phone, not in real life. I became close with some of those kids and even a few of the adults. Half would preach that were would be a cure soon. And about half would say we’re okay just the way we are. A few were just as silent as me. Being fertile isn’t everything, they would say. Food can be grown anywhere. We don’t even need the transgenic fruit to survive. For the vast majority of human history, people were not half-trees. Great minds and spirits of the past did not produce fruit. Well, not literally. Not on a single day of their lives.

True, there was that recent argument that Jesus had been the way we are now. “I am the vine and you are the branches.” And other quotes like that. “Eat of my body and drink of my blood.” I think it’s funny that today Jesus is always portrayed in visual art as a total fruiter, and yet when you look at the art of the distant past, he was just like any other human.

There are still countries, I would tell myself, that have resisted the transgenic revolution. These were usually smaller countries, many of them dominated by some of the newer religions that were catching on. I can’t tell you how many times in my fantasies I saw myself moving to one of those countries, perhaps finding my great love there looked exactly like me. I knew that when I was older I could always fall back on visiting one of those dating sites exclusively for the non-germinating. But I didn’t look forward to the experience. I tried to imagine myself falling in love with someone just like me. It made me feel so weird. It made me want to just float out of my body.

Actually, if I emigrated to one of those non-transgenic countries, my foreign love wouldn’t even have opercula. He would be a “skinflint,” to use the horrible term the fruiting use to insult the fruitless. Would I be as accepted as I am? Would my love want me to undergo painful surgeries to remove my opercula, so my body would look like the cultural norm? Wouldn’t my lover want my body to look like a body he grew up fantasizing about?

Things all sped up when my sister had gone from being engaged to actively planning her wedding. I can still see my mother and her sitting before that glowing screen, oohing and aahing at the various wedding dresses with their golden and silver body trellises. There were nectar supplements to assure a bride had a bountiful harvest on her body for her wedding night. Some brides-to-be grew their branches very long in the back in preparation for the big day, so they could be woven into the train of the wedding dress. The groom would then harvest these on the honeymoon. Some guys got so hot for that ritual. They would trade stories. I hated overhearing those conversations.

I remember the day I left. I had been watching a scene in a movie in which a very beautiful young man was sunning himself on a dock. He was about my age. He was famous. He was absorbing the light he needed to complete his natural fruition. His branches were strong and wiry, like a second musculature outside his already chiseled body. He had gone through his latest seasonal flowering and now he was bearing fruit. Some sort of miniature pear-hybrid all over him. I had to turn it off. Because I imagined the look he would give me after seeing my body. And then how quickly his gaze would avert itself, knowing where not to look ever again.

I went into the river on a summer night. It was warm water, or warm enough anyway, and I had no fear of drowning. Like virtually all non-germinaters, my malfunctioning opercula hid functional gills. True, these were vestigial, but I could submerge for extended periods. This is why people like me had even been banned from the Olympics. Our unfair advantage.

I had swim googles on. And a strong waterproof flashlight I had only recently purchased. I wondered what my family would make of that, when they saw the last purchase I had made. I hoped they would not follow me, not create embarrassing MISSING notices. I wasn’t missing. I was gone.

I swam towards the Deadlands. The area of no video cameras, the area we are forbidden to inhabit. The area which the last great war had destroyed. It had once been a metropolis swarming with life. It was a long journey, but I made it. I didn’t really care what happened to me then, the night I swam away, but that has changed now.

I had to leave the river and walk the last fifty miles or so. Down the dead highways. I thought they were pretty. The desolation. The wildflowers everywhere taking back the roads. The animals come to look at you. They’re no longer afraid.

I don’t want to go back. This is home now. My problem now seems small in comparison to those faced by the war survivors here and those crazy enough to come live here. I’m able to help people here. People with greater challenges than me. Skinflints abound, but so do variant transgenic beings of all stripes. We have a loose form of government that’s almost no government at all. We are blocked from receiving news from the outside world. Our technology only operates within the Deadlands. The outside world doesn’t want us to know anything.

I hope my sister had a beautiful wedding. I hope she has a lovely marriage. I hope her children bear fruit and their children bear fruit. “Long vines to you!” as the wedding toast goes.

One night the jamming of signals they do out there must have gone down. Because an iffy signal bled over onto my screen and we were suddenly watching their t.v. for a short while. Instead of our home grown programs. It was a beauty pageant. A glittery affair. Vines everywhere. Some of my friends were over, and their children, and we all gathered around to watch the girls strut and flounce to show off their fruits.

Many of those in the room had never even seen fruiting bodies. There were squeals of laughter and disgust from the kids. Parents chided them. These older ones looked at my opercula in the flickering light from the screen and deeper lines formed in the brows of some of my friends. “You okay?” they asked, as true friends do.

“Of course I’m okay, stupid!”

We all laughed.

Later that night, after they had all left, I went into my bedroom at the rear of my house, and sat on the edge of my bed facing a pier mirror. That mirror which had just always been here in this house that we found, that was ours for the taking. That mirror which had probably belonged to someone who died a hundred years ago. I like that mirror.

I no longer wear the clothing they wear in the outside world, with openings for branches. I wear whole garments now. But I was naked.

I held a pair of pruning shears in my right hand, and as I looked in the mirror, I clipped each branch that had begun to grow from each operculum.

I felt good doing it. And then my lover came into the room. He was monstrous. He was beautiful. He was the sun in the night.

“Do my back, darling…please?”

He smiled as he took the shears tenderly from my hand.

Gift

Jason.

It would be so easy to say it’s all Jason’s fault. After all, he was the one who retrieved the package from our mail box. While Sarah and I were still at work, he opened it and read the instructions and blindly did what they told him to do. But it’s what any kid would do. We remind ourselves of that. When we get to really arguing. When we get ugly with each other. Hundreds of times we’ve reminded ourselves.

And I’ve looked at that set of instructions hundreds of times. It’s a single sheet of paper that arrived folded in the package. It looks like any other goofy set of instructions telling kids what to do with a toy. Large, hand-drawn comic book style instructions with black and white drawings show you how to put the contained “seeds” in a filled bathtub. Kids can’t wait to see the seeds “COME ALIVE.” They can’t wait to see the “MAGIC SWIMMERS!!!” promised. The words under the drawings are in several languages, so kids around the world can understand no matter where they live. No matter which country.

I’ve never seen the seeds. I have to imagine them. I have to go by what Jason tells Sarah and me, when we ask him to repeat the story. He hates telling it now. He’s almost a year older.

He’s started talking about leaving. At his ridiculous age. Where would he go? How would he live? He carries a heavy load of guilt, we know. We keep telling him that it’s not his fault when he talks about leaving. Or when he hints at doing something worse. I take him by the shoulders and tell him. “It’s not your fault.” But, really, a tiny voice deep down inside me screams that it is his fault. It totally is, kid. You did this to us.

Jason says when he placed the seeds in the warm bath water we were at work. It was late afternoon. He had just gotten home from school. They were in the mailbox inside the envelope addressed to him. It was a label sticker, not handwriting. Later, we noticed his name was actually spelled wrong. His birthday had been less than a month before, so he figured it was just one of his uncles who had sent them. Perhaps the young uncle who travels a lot with his army job and is always late with birthday presents, when he remembers them at all.

Or it was just some sort of free promotional gift for something he had filled out somewhere. Some contest or other. He didn’t give it a lot of thought, he admitted. He just wanted to see what would happen.

It was slow at first, Jason said. Nothing seemed to be happening with the seeds. They just sank to the bottom of the warm tub and rested there on the bathmat doing nothing whatsoever. “What a rip!” Jason thought. He went downstairs to watch t.v., made a t.v. dinner, texted a bit with his friends. Then he ran back upstairs to the bathroom and looked.

And they were swimming around in there. Little black aquatic creatures. One for each seed. Five of them. Not like fish. Too many tiny little limbs attached, he said. And the shapes of their heads were different. It wasn’t all that exciting. He ran down to the basement to see if we still had the aquarium. He wasn’t sure if we had donated it to Goodwill after the last of the goldfish deaths.

When he got back upstairs, and he assured us it couldn’t have been more than five or ten minutes later, there were no longer five of the things in the water. Now there were at least a hundred of the small black creatures swimming in the tub. And he saw the drain cover had been removed. Partially. The tub was slowly draining. He watched as the black creatures swam with everything they had in them for the drain. And down they went. It wasn’t a random sort of swimming. It was directed. It was intelligent. And they were gone in seconds. He watched them go.

He watched them go.

He said he had no idea how that happened. The drain cover being partially open. Sarah slapped him once. Hard. She slapped him hard across the face when he said that part, when he repeated the story. When he said that he didn’t know how the drain cover was open. I don’t think she knew why she slapped him. We all knew by then that he hadn’t done it. They had. I think she slapped him because he had mentioned the moment when things truly became irrevocable.

We saved the envelope they came in, but the return address was fake. When I searched online, I saw how many other people had received the package too. Many of them had different fake return addresses, but no small number had our same fake address on their package too. The address in Idaho. It said it was a “toy company.” The government had begun collecting the packages. By then, we realized the government was also rounding up those people who had received one of the packages and that those people were not returning to their lives. Not even their children were returning to their lives.

So we chose to be one of the families who remained silent. We chose to proceed with our lives.

I remember when we first noticed it in our drinking glasses. It would form a black gelatinous mass on one side of a clear glass. Perfectly circular. Smaller than your pinkie fingerprint. You could turn the glass away from you and the mass would swim across and paste itself against the side of the drinking glass nearest your face. Even with a magnifying glass, you couldn’t see any distinguishing features, any sense of a tiny animal or animals in the mass. You would see see nothing in the filtered water container in the fridge. It looked like crystal-clear water. And when you filled the drinking glass and sat down to watch your favorite television show, it would be there within minutes. On the side of the glass.

Well, of course you didn’t drink it, you’ll say to yourself.

But if you didn’t drink it, the pain would start up inside. Inside your guts. Sometimes in your head. In your brain. It felt like knives twisting or sometimes like hot coals placed inside one of your organs. Other forms of pain were something new on earth. Like nothing anyone on earth had described in any medical textbook. I know because I would type words in the search bar. The only matches were people describing similar pain that started only with this year. It was dangerous to confess such things on blogs or websites. The government was tracking us all down by then. I stopped typing things in search bars.

So we did as our bodies told us.

Soon, we learned the pain would stop if we walked outside the house.

If we walked a certain direction, the pain increased. If we walked the other direction, it relented or completely disappeared. You’re getting warm. Warmer. Warmer. Very hot. No, you’re cold. Go back the other way! You’re feezing! You know this game. Cold hurt like hell.

So now we leave the house when we’re told. All three of us, Sarah and Jason and I.

Remarkably, we are still able to keep our jobs and Jason goes to school every day. Except for the days when the pain tells him to stay home “sick” and then go out. While we are at work, he goes on what we now know are missions. We go out in the evenings. Sometimes in the middle of the night, Sarah just leaves. I say nothing when she slips out of our bed and begins dressing. She says nothing on the nights that I get into my clothes at two or three in the morning and leave as fast as I can, to stop the gnawing pain.

We don’t talk with each other about the places we go on these “guided journeys,” or the things we must do. The things the pain makes us do. Because on the few occasions we have tried to pool our information, the volume on the pain was turned up to its highest level. We are still allowed to have normal conversations, to pretend that life continues as normal. But it’s a hollow thing, an exercise in calming our own nerves at the dinner table. It helps to pass the time.

I think we’ve all thought of suicide by now. Probably we’ve all thought of familicide too.

You probably would too. In our shoes.

There’s always the government. We could go to them. But the pain would be excruciating. And nobody has seen any of those people return. The word on the street and online is that those people were probably all seen as collateral damage. They’re just gone. It makes sense.

I don’t want to tell you all the things I’ve done. I don’t want you to hate me any more than you already do right now, as one of the uninfected reading my words.

I don’t want to tell you how I’ve had to open my mouth and disgorge a dark, gelatinous fluid into the food of my coworkers kept in the little mini-fridge we share in our university office bay.

Only the oldest colleagues in my office still leave their food out of their sight. That generation doesn’t seem to get what’s happening. The younger coworkers are well aware. I’ve seen some of them eyeing me. They talk to me differently now. A few of them do, anyway.

I’ve started to get the pain around them. They know, you see. They know which ones know. Just as they know if I try to talk to anyone.

I know what I’ll have to do in a matter of a very short time. The pain increases and the thought forms in my head. When they approach and speak with me. The ones who have guessed I’m on the new “down low.” They might have already spoken with the government. It might be too late.

I know what I have to do.

Unless my young colleagues are better organized than I am. Part of me, and it’s a large part, hopes they are. Hopes they win. I’m tired.

But for now I must go and have another ordinary afternoon, stand before my host of angels, my paying students, and explain William Burroughs (how ironic, right?) to the innocents in a way that the words will walk carefully on society’s eggshells, and yet still perhaps give them a hint of a warning that the safety they are feeling is a safety within a placid dream that someone other than themselves is dreaming.

(science fiction)

A NEW BLITZKRIEG



American Airlines’ Flight AA2497 departed Atlanta in the early evening, just after six, bound for Dallas-Forth Worth. It took off into a warm July sky. No storms waited in its flight path. The passengers felt mostly relaxed. It had been expected to touch down on earth again at 8:33 pm. local time. But it didn’t happen.

At 8:33 p.m. the flight was still circling, refused permission to land or continue on to any other airport. The United States Air Force had scrambled an E-3 Sentry alongside two F-22s. These interceptors waited to see what word would come down from on high. They were fully prepared to destroy civilian aircraft and snuff out American lives.

This is because Flight AA2497 had become two Flights AA2497. As the flight approached DFW, it had morphed into a set of mirror image twins. Both flights contained the exact same crew and passengers. And both craft were in a panic, as visual contact had been made between the two planes in mid-air. That is, passengers had seen their doppelgangers looking out the windows of the plane flying next to them. Transmissions from the pilots and co-pilots of these dual cockpits were nearly identical. Nobody was sure which plane was the “real McCoy” or whether such logic could even be applied to what had happened. The air traffic controllers were bewitched into stunned silence when they heard the same pilot transmitting from two different planes, his voice overlapping his voice.

The secretary of defense and the president were conferring. Since a state of war existed between the United States of America and that nameless species which had lately announced its existence as interdimensional beings living with us, able to travel right through us, interpenetrating us like photons, the decision was not an easy matter. They had already attacked our infrastructure and information technologies. There had been human casualties. Nobody really knew what “they” were. We had found ways to block them, we had used the best code we could finesse. But increasingly they made new incursions. They were able to interfere with the natural progression of time. They were able to use backdoors in space. We were at war. And yet nobody had ever even seen the enemy.

Everyone knew this anomaly of Flight AA2497 had been caused by them. But nobody knew the meaning of it. The President and the Secretary had to make the judgment call. The flight was running out of fuel and refueling mid-air was not an option. It was ultimately decided to let both planes land. The military was evacuating the airport of civilians and all other flights were diverted elsewhere.

The planes taxied down separate runways only moments apart. The passengers and crews on both airplanes were told they could not deboard. They were to be quarantined for an indeterminate amount of time — until the matter could be resolved. This was depressing news, but the passengers on both aircraft were genuinely relieved that they had managed to finally touch down, reach the ground alive. They had seen the armed interceptors tailing their planes. They knew they had survived a close call.

The president breathed a huge sigh of relief when he was apprised that no earth-shattering disaster had occurred when the planes landed.

“We just have no idea what to do with all the extra humans,” one general joked. “And which ones are the originals and who are the copies?”

They were still laughing about this when the call came through from the military brass on the ground at DFW. It was a panicked voice that relayed the information: “Sir, it’s the worst possible scenario. Nuclear option tenable. We no longer have two identical planes. We had two….then we had four identicals..then eight…sixteen…you get the picture. They’re just materializing and destroying the airport. It appears to be some sort of virus…some sort of spatial virus! There are hundreds of them if not thousands already. I have to evacuate because….”

There was a huge crashing sound of twisting metal and a scream. Many screams. Then silence.

And the mitosis of planes went on through the landscape, that warm summer night in Texas. Flight AA2497 went on duplicating, horizontally, city to city, and vertically, jets piled atop jets up into the clouds, even to the asscrack of doom.

And the passengers wondered and wondered and wondered as they watched and sometimes caught a glimpse of themselves through the wreckage, looking back at themselves in terror and hoping, hoping to get off the plane as soon as possible.

In the Future

     A man had killed his wife and her lover. He had done it in the classic style, right there in the matrimonial bed where he had discovered them enjoying their blood sport. The case was not adjudicated in the usual manner, for it was discovered that the man had complete belief in his innocence, indeed he was innocent, as he had used neurotech to excise not only all memory of the murder, but all memories of his wife involving her lover. He had curtailed the story, substituting a narrative which ended the day before he had discovered his wife had a lover (the day he had murdered them).  He had used a bootleg Chinese program. So he knew nothing of his wife's murder. Such innocence is a social problem. Forensic neurologists testified that they had discovered the tell-tale signs of erasure throughout the man's brain. At that point in history, such erasures were not yet done in a seamless manner, neurologically speaking. For those who specialized in such work, there would be traces they could search for and find. The technology used left its own little markers and such bootleg technology rarely came without some largely harmless spam serving the political agenda of the country which had manufactured it. You might see some political shifts in the individual as well. They might be a walking billboard defending that foreign country's interests. That part of the investigation sometimes yielded very funny stories. There was even a television program about that. It was a humorous show. You had to be careful with what you bought on the street and used on your brain. Murderer X had actually moved to a new city, started a new job, deliberately lost most of his friends and acquaintances. He didn't like the feelings they aroused in him, how they looked at him as a guilty man and attempted to make him feel like a guilty man. Because most of them knew he was guilty; the facts were pretty bald. He had established a new life and it wasn't a bad one. He had just distanced himself from his family and friends because he didn't like the cognitive dissonance that came with this set of people. In due course, he was found guilty and sentenced to have his memory restored. The false end of the narrative he had contrived was removed and the truth was re-ingrained. He would be tested for cognitive revisitations of the murder while in prison. If the process (call it guilt or self-punishment) showed signs of lessening over the years (and this often happened with inmates) his mind would be wiped, retooled, and the memories of his love for his wife would be "freshened" to bring a new and revitalized sense of loss much closer to the surface. If the murderer in question lacked guilt, there was a special process whereby it could be successfully simulated. So even sociopaths were no longer immune from corrosive regret. Also, the diminishing pain of the punitive sense of being imprisoned (after five years or so, the mind adjusts) would be "fixed," refreshed at the same time. In the future, one could not "get used" to prison. Prison did not allow this to happen. The way some might touch up the grey in their hair, the State could now touch up the pain in the conscience of its prisoners.. It was a great help and a great pleasure to those involved in doing the work of the fatherland, with the rare exception of those few nervous nellies who suffered pangs of conscience, who might still believe the rank doctrine of the autonomy of the human mind. But these were soon themselves corrected through the miracle of neurotech, if they wished to remain in their well-paying jobs. Most exercised this option and were fine literally overnight.



---after Foucault

Friend

Keiko followed Marissa down the hallway, but at a safe distance. She blended into the crowd of other girls changing classes. If Marissa had looked back, she would have seen Keiko just standing there, the one still point in that flux of bodies. She would have stood out. And Marissa would have seen her odd stare.

But Marissa didn't look back. She entered the girls bathroom.

Keiko waited as the girls aflutter with conversation, with graded papers in their hands, vanished into the doors of classrooms up and down the hallway. They broke up quickly, like a cloud of butterflies or a snow squall that is over as soon as it's begun

Only Keiko was left standing there. Like a statue in the hallway.

She slowly made her way to the door of the girls bathroom. She made no more sound than a cat. That's how she visualized herself as she looked down at her shoes while she walked.

She managed to open the bathroom door as quietly as it was humanly possible and crept inside.

Marissa was standing at one of the sinks, combing her hair.

"Hello, Keiko," the older girl greeted her. She never turned her head to acknowledge the other girl, and there was no way she could have seen her in the mirror. She was just always aware of everything like that.

Keiko advanced but remained silent.

"Oh, silly me. I forgot to flush," Marissa said. She still hadn't looked at Keiko and continued to fuss with her hair.

Keiko walked to the toilet stall opposite the sink at which Marissa was standing She went to flush the toilet and then realized something was swimming around in the bowl.

She gasped.

"Disgusting, I know," Marissa laughed.

It looked like a salamander. But not quite. It wasn't any animal Keiko had ever seen and she loved to look at books filled with photographs of animals. Then she got a better look at it. It looked like several seahorses glued together.

"You're not going to tell anybody, are you?" Marissa's voice was pure sarcasm. It was a threat.

Now, finally,  Marissa turned and in one quick jump was at the toilet. She used her hand to scoop out the creature swimming around in there, and brought it up to Keiko's mouth, as she forced the younger girl against the wall of the toilet stall.

Keiko tried to fight her but Marissa was so strong. She forced the creature into Keiko's mouth, and by using her hand to nearly suffocate her, forced her to swallow the slimy, jagged creature.

Keiko felt the creature scrambling around in her mouth. Then she could feel the thing making its way down her throat. She knew the moment when it reached her stomach. Marissa stepped back and smiled.

"No, you're not going to tell anyone." She smiled.. It was the same wicked smile which had first attracted Keiko to her, which had made her want her for a friend. Though her other friends had warned her. Even her mother, who liked all children, had disapproved.

"Be good and I'll tell you what it eats. Be even better and I'll tell you how to get rid of it. Are you going to be good?"

Keiko nodded in fear.

"Good. Now you better get back to class. Social studies, isn't it?"

Keiko ran from the bathroom, feeling like she was going to throw up. If only it were that simple, she thought.

A Man Woke Up

A man woke up holding his wife's hand. He hadn't opened his eyes yet, but he was contemplating asking her for his favorite breakfast. Or was it his turn to make breakfast? He felt waking up was harder than usual that morning. Instead of using his eyes, he kept them closed and let his fingers explore his love's dainty hand. His fingers "read" the unusual setting of the wedding ring they had spent such a great deal of time picking out, designing together. The baby must still be asleep, he thought. He smiled at the quietness of the moment with his eyes still shut. It was nice. His fingers lingered on that strange asymmetry of diamonds.  But she was not in bed with him. Why was she standing next to his bed? As he continued to trace a curve in the ring's setting, a harp of diamonds, he opened his eyes

When he did see her, confusion came flooding in.  His wife was many years younger. She was smiling, but there were tears in her eyes. How could she be younger? His mind briefly entertained the ridiculous notion that he had traveled back in time. He searched his mind for what had happened the previous night, before he had gone to sleep, but there was nothing. It was a blank. This nothing disturbed him greatly. He felt a chasm of dread opening up. He spoke his wife's name and watched as one of the tears which had gathered into her eyes made its escape and traveled down her lovely, impossibly young face.

He tried to rise to comfort her, but something was holding him in the bed. He saw the machines then, he heard one of them, he realized where he was. It was a hospital room and a cheerless one.

"Dad, I'm Rebecca," the woman he had at first seen as a younger version of his wife sobbed as she bent over to kiss him on the forehead. "Mom's gone. You've been in a coma for nineteen years. She died in the auto accident. You survived, but they weren't sure if you would ever wake up. I told them you would. Eventually. I promised myself." A smile broke through her lovely face. Her mother's face.

He saw the ring on her hand as it came up to caress his face. It was indeed his wife's ring.