B.A.D.D.

Mr. Pritchard's office had a kind of pretended cool about a decade and a half past relevant. The Cure on a poster to the left of a visiting student, The Fresh Prince on the right. Jeremy figured in three or four more years he'd have a DragonBall or All Your Base poster right in time for noone to get the joke. For a guidance counselor, Pritchard was too eager to be a friend to of much guidance or counsel.
He was drumming a pencil while explaining to some parent the benefits of foreign language education over the phone. Jeremy looked out the window. Past the Fresh Prince, and into the interior of the school's atrium. Banners extolling the new virtue -diversity- hung listing in the current of air conditioning. It was an Indiana March, but the AC was on. Awful. Pritchard was wrapping up the phone call. Jeremy wanted a cigarette.
"Is this about my writing assignment?" Jeremy thought he might as well jump in. He should have known better than to submit a piece about zombies to Mrs. Waters. She'd come from ivy on the East Coast, rumored from Church ivy. Pritchard opened his mouth, grey mustache dancing.
"Not specifically." Took a breath. "How are you doing, Jeremy?"
"Fine, I guess."
"You sure?"
"Sure. Why not?"
"Well, your father"
"What about him? He sucked. He left. Finally. As far as I'm concerned it's an improvement." Pritchard put the tip of his pencil to his lip. A bell rang and students started noising though the halls.
"Look. He's a drunk, useless. He didn't beat us, didn't scream or yell, just sat around collecting disability and drinking Jack Daniel's. Mostly he just took up space. He took a swing at mom once, and she clobbered him. Told him if he wanted to hit her, she'd fight back and he'd wind up getting his ass handed to him in front of his boys and the whole neighborhood. Dad went to bed and there was nothing else about it."
"Your mother is a very strong woman."
"Strong? Nothing to do with it. She just knows what she needs to do."
"What about Jake?"
"I get it now. He ran off and you want me to tell you where. Sure, half of county's looking for him and Deke. Well, like I told them, I don't know." Jeremy took a breath of his own. Thought about where he'd smoke after this. Pushed back the heat and wet at the corners of his eyes. "The last time I saw him was in December, right after he got busted with the booze. Dad took us out in the car. It was the Sunday evening after, like, four or something. We get on these back country roads and the old man cranks up to like, seventy. Tells us he's been drinking Jack and Coke since noon -which is bullshit. He'd been drinking since '91. But his hands are steady. Car's going fast but totally in control, and he's telling us if we're going to drink we gotta keep it cool and stay collected -like he's trying to pass on some alcoholic's wisdom. The whole time Jake's just looking at him, not like dad was crazy, which he was, but like it confirmed something for him. Answered a question that never got said out loud. Then this deer comes flying across the road, and there was this thump -I guess the mirror clipped its tail or something and dad slows the car down. We sat, totally silent for a minute. The I just started laughing. Came out of nowhere. Couldn't stop. Pretty soon dad and Jake are cutting up real hard too. We must have sat there on the shoulder for ten minutes busting our guts, tears running down our faces. The more the laughing hurt, the harder we laughed. Finally dad gets out something like, 'I love you boys' and Jake just stops. Gives dad this look like he wants to believe him and maybe even does. Says he wants to go home. We drive home, speed limit and stop signs and silence. Jake was gone in the morning."

The Moderately Attractive Princess From the Midwest and the King of the Moon

Once upon a time, in a far away place -the moon let's say, was a King. The King was very Kingly in his Lunar Kingdom. He lorded himself over the dust and craters. He lorded himself over the very tides of the Earth. He was, however, constantly fearing that the inhabitants of Earth would challenge his rule of the moon in their jealousy over his Kingliness. The King then prohibited travel to the moon. He sealed off his Lunar Kingdom to keep himself and his subjects safe. All was well with the King until he realized that he had only one subject -his lunar dog.

This is not to say that his lunar dog was a poor subject. The dog was all affection and energy. He spent his days and nights plowing into drifts of lunar dust dancing in the unfiltered radiation of Sol, the tiny, moderately cool (as stars go) yellow star that gives Earth life. On especially energetic days, the lunar dog chased the line of dawn and dusk as it painted the moon. On Christmas the lunar dog would make sure everyone knew that flag jutting impolitely from the surface of the moon was his territory. Nevertheless, the King of the moon was lonely with his one subject.

Why not just reopen travel to the moon to solve his dilemma? One of The Conditions for Being King of the Moon was that no edict of his could be reversed. Being essentially human, he was quite incapable of creating new subjects (the lunar dog had been a happy accident, having originally been a small bit of dust and ice flying aimlessly through the cosmos -but that's another tale) and had condemned himself to be forever lonely. In his great loneliness, the King of the moon kissed the face of his Lunar Kingdom and so stamped it with his terrible loneliness that the face of the moon became terribly sad and lonely.

The face of the moon became so distressingly sad that the people of Earth forgot about the moon, in fact all things Lunar. Now, the moon didn't quit existing -it just got blocked out of everyone's mind. The tides still tided, the night still had light from it's reflection, and lunatics still acted loony. All written accounts of the moon were ignored, and even some lunar textbooks got burned in a lab accident when a technician, so averse to the terrible sadness of the face of the moon, thought they were quite safe to leave on a hotplate.

Some time later, a young woman from the Midwestern United States sat contemplating her place in the universe. This would not be so unusual except that this young woman happened to be The Moderately Attractive (As Princesses Go) Princess From the Midwest Who Prides Herself on Her Knowledge of Lots of Things. Now you might wonder why she's only Moderately Attractive, or why that's even important -we'll get to that another time. How attractive? Fine. She's slightly less attractive than the love of your life when you haven't seen said love in three or four weeks and said love walks through your front door with lunch and a bottle of wine and a fair bit more attractive than your third-grade crush advanced to age twenty-four.

Ahem.

While contemplating her place in the universe, The Moderately Attractive Princess From the Midwest realized something was wrong. There was a missing spot in her knowledge. Something she knew, but couldn't remember. As you know, this is a terrible sensation. Something like having your intestinal wall pushed about with too much pasta and your calves being pawed at by a cat whose name you cannot remember, and so cannot curse. (Students of Latin are all too familiar with this sensation, I can assure you.)

The bother of this sensation followed her about, gnawed at her consciousness until one day, staring over the rim of the milk jug (the Moderately Attractive Princess From the Midwest didn't always bother with a glass) she realized that this hole in her knowledge was round. Not just rounded, but downright circular. Something circular was missing! Given this logic, and her weekly stipend, she went out and bought a bottle of beer. Sitting and drinking her beer The Moderately Attractive Princess From the Midwest thought hard. Alas, beer was not the answer. She thought a walk would help her mind and while walked happened across a farmer's market. Being an avid fan of the avocado, she stopped in and was struck with a grapefruit. Perplexed, the Moderately Attractive Princess From the Midwest picked up the offending fruit and deduced that perhaps she was simply in need of some vitamin C. She purchased the grapefruit and ate it right there in the parking lot. Licking her fingers (alas, though she had been trained in Truly Princess-Like Behavior, in fact having a bachelor of arts degree in Princessery, she was from the Midwest and no-one in the Midwest can long ignore the siren call of fruit residue on one's fingers -much like people from Texas and barbecue sauce, or college undergrads from pretty much anywhere and beer) The Moderately Attractive Princess From the Midwest realized that the roundish hole in her knowledge was not caused by lack of vitamin C.

Drastic measures had been called for. The Four H fair was in town, and The Moderately Attractive Princess From the Midwest Who Prides Herself on Her Knowledge of Lots of Things made a concession -she would visit the gypsy fortune teller.

The Moderately Attractive Princess From the Midwest entered the gypsy fortune teller's tent and said to the gypsy fortune teller,

"Hi, I'm the Moderately Attractive Princess From the Midwest..."
"Who Prides Herself on Her Knowledge of Lots of Things, yes, yes, dear I know."
"Ok, well, do you know why I am here?"
Silence.

After learning that gypsy fortune tellers are not mind readers, the Moderately Attractive Princess From the Midwest explained her problem. She told the gypsy fortune teller about the beer, the grapefruit, and the horrible sensation that her knowledge lurked somewhere past 'qui' 'quae' but before 'quod.'

"Ahhhh, Maud, may I call you Maud?"
"If you must. I suppose my full name is quite long."
"Very good. Maud, the knowledge you seek you shall find again, but humor me and smoke this."
"Oh, I don't know. I don't really trust the stuff myself."
"If you seek the learn again this knowledge you are missing, take the damn pipe."
The Moderately Attractive Princess From the Midwest Who Prides Herself on Her Knowledge of Lots of Things took the pipe, toked a bit and tripped all over creation for about six hours. The roundness of many things in the world swam before her and she through them -for what Princess, let alone The Moderately Attractive Princess From the Midwest Who Prides Herself on Her Knowledge of Lots of Things doesn't have gently illuminating experiences with hallucinogens? However, her knowledge was still roundly wounded when she returned from the trip.

"Hoy, I still know not what I ought to know, and not knowing nothing of the nature of the knowing that I no longer know!"
"Don't be so impatient. This very night, Maud, you will learn again what you have forgot." Curtly, but politely (for she was a princess), The Moderately Attractive Princess From the Midwest Who Prides Herself on Her Knowledge of Lots of Things took her leave. Now, since she had tripped for six hours the sun had set long before she left the tent of the gypsy fortune teller and cursing her failure to bring a flashlight The Moderately Attractive Princess From the Midwest Who Prides Herself on Her Knowledge of Lots of Things realized that there was light all about, even after she left the Midway. It was like silver was dripping from all surfaces, and she followed a tunnel of the molten blue light that fell between some clouds and to her surprise saw the Face of the Lunar King in all it's terrible sadness and her being the only person observing the moon that night from Earth (for even telescopes avoided it's sadness -it scratched the lenses you know) died on the spot of sheer empathy.

However, she was The Moderately Attractive Princess From the Midwest Who Prides Herself on Her Knowledge of Lots of Things, and holding to the Knowledge of All Those Things, her spirit skated along the silvery light of the Lunar loneliness and visited the King of the Moon.

Now, wouldn't this defy the edict of the King of the Moon that no-one travel to the Moon? She is a princess after all, and ever and always a princess can defy the edicts of a king, you ninny.

The Moderately Attractive Princess From the Midwest Who Prides Herself on Her Knowledge of Lots of Things said to the King,
"King! What has happened? Why does the Moon bear such a stamp of sorrow, sadness, loneliness and woe? Why, back on earth we've forgotten the Moon entirely!"
The King was struck by her impassioned speech.
"I, I had no idea! Do the tides still tide?"
"Well, yes."
"Is the night still lighted?"
"Yes!"
"Are...oh my, are the lunatics still loony?"
"Oh my, are they ever. Did you know that The President still has troops in Iraq?"
"Oh then what does it matter! I have condemned myself to a lifetime of solitude and no-one even knows!"
"But I, The Moderately Attractive Princess From the Midwest Who Prides Herself on Her Knowledge of Lots of Things, know. And, truth to tell, Your Kingship, it killed me."
The King of the Moon was so struck with remorse that his selfish sadness had killed such a precocious creature as The Moderately Attractive Princess From the Midwest Who Prides Herself on Her Knowledge of Lots of Things died himself.

The end?

Of course not, you ninnies. Before he died, the King of the Moon changed the face of the Moon from terrible loneliness to reflective compassion. In doing so his own life-force fell to the Earth and brought The Moderately Attractive Princess From the Midwest Who Prides Herself on Her Knowledge of Lots of Things back to life. On waking she promptly went home for a shower, the lunar dog bounding at her side.

A flying dream - Part 1

The dream. It was a childhood nightmare. She had other dreams, of course, for who has only one dream in her life? There was the dream about her father, visiting from heaven or nirvana or wherever -he smelled of tobacco and coffee. His mouth didn't move, she heard his voice and hearing, could not distinguish one word from another, yet she was always comforted by the dream. An early experience with evangelistic sentimentality after his death left her always imagining he had wings in the dream, great, feathered wings which would carry them both into softness of clouds.
There was the dream about Ernest Hemmingway, tanned brown from baking in the African sun, the licorice smell of absinthe or lime and scotch held in his beard, bent in an indulgent, avuncular smile. He was her Virgil, taking her to foreign lands, far from her native Indiana, filled with pygmies, outlandish mythological creatures, and hills, mountains, gullies, ancient trees and monumental ruins.
The dream she first had a few weeks after her eleventh birthday. A confusing rush of falling, falling and caught by the image and ideal of Cary Grant, Tony Bennett, John Lennon, and Leonard Cohen amalgamated into some composite ideal of quality of voice, trueness of spirit, reassuring masculinity, and impassioned devotion. Falling, spinning, wondering if her father's wings could return her to flight, and waking up, covers kicked away, pajama bottoms tugged down and tangled around her knees, her body-length pillow clutched with one arm, the other pinned across her waist, ankles crossed tight. Panting, wondering if she was damned. If it was sin even though she hadn't meant to. Later that day her mother noticed a change, the precocious, energetic daughter had turned a contemplative eye at all things, inward and outward. For the first time, she spoke to her mother with the seriousness of the first, tremulous steps toward adulthood. They spoke about her father's death.
Her older sister, nineteen at the time and finishing a degree in social work, later consoled her and offered assurances about the naturality of her experience, that she was on the way to becoming a woman. She took her shopping and bought her a book on adolescent female sexuality written by a famous female sex-counsellor. Her sister threw her a menarche party two months later.
There were other dreams of course. Thousands forgotten, incorporated into a poem here or a sketch there or released like a well-loved bird to carry on to somewhere else, hopefully better but different at least. This dream, however, was more terrifying than usual. She and her father were flying, she had her own wings and the doctors held her down with the detachment of trauma surgeons. Their instruments were mercilessly sharp, clinically designed to do to her an act of pure torture with no physical pain at all.
As the surgeons explained that the operation went well, that her wrists and hands would require physical therapy, and that she might even be able to drive a car in a year or so, but so sorry, her new impairment would invalidate her pilot's license all she could see was a large cloud, falling like thousands of wide, moist snowflakes, drifting ever so slowly to carpet floor, trod upon and unseen by the doctors and nurses -feathers.

Rough horror bit

"Celine." Her name hung, soft and seemed to fill the room.
"Celine." He repeated the name after her, taking comfort in its sibilance, the long sound of the last syllable. It occurred to him that the name, the sound of her voice, was almost all he knew of her. He knew one other thing -she was a survivor like he.
"What did you do that first day?" Again, the softness of her voice, the human warmth that crept into the darkness of the room. He could almost feel her breath, though she was a few meters away, out of reach.
"I ran. Had never been in a fight, not really. Learned hard and fast this last week."
"How many?"
"Five. Adding the one that came down here some time before you arrived, six. I killed that one with a post or something, sticking out of the ground over there. God it stinks."
Silence. She shuffled a bit and he heard the sound of a foot striking something soft.
"I'm glad you're alive," he added.
"I'm glad too."
"Well, aside from the obvious, I'm glad it was you who came down here and not another one. I don't think I have the strength. I haven't eaten in a while, days maybe? I can't tell time down here. My leg is broken, so even if I got over the fear, I can't go foraging."
Silence. Breathing moved closer and the sound was accompanied by small, sharp crunches. She stopped on the ring of glass, each fragment as thin as an eggshell. Slid her foot one way, the other.
"What's with the glass?"
"I broke the light bulbs so I could hear what was coming. Saw it in a movie. Tom Cruise, maybe?"
She was now maybe two meters away and sighed.
"You're dead, you know that right?"
"Thanks."
"No, really, you can't move. I can't carry you. You're either going to starve down here or more of them will find you down here and..."
"And what, Celine?"
"...and the military isn't moving here," she finished lamely. They both knew what she meant. There was no doubt.
"Nevertheless, I'm happy you're here, alive. I mean, you're human. That has to count for something."
"It's reassuring to talk. Hear a voice. Do you have any weapons?."
"Just these weak hands. I lost my hatchet in the one before I made my way down here."
"Yeah. I've been through three or four weapons so far. All I have is a big kitchen knife. It's getting loose around the handle." She moved closer, he heard the metal of the knife press on the bare concrete as she scooted a little closer. She was still a meter and a half away.
"You're not thinking euthanasia are you?"
"No, sorry. I just...you know, feeling of security and all."
"Sure." If he heard the next line of glass crunch, he knew he could reach her. Her heels scraped and he could envision her sitting on them, crouched and uneasy.
"You know, I almost can't believe you're real. I think I'd like to touch you."
"Can you put the knife down?"
"Right, sorry." He heard the sharp noise of it striking the concrete, and the almost imperceptible sound of her picking it back up. "There, all better."
"Careful! Don't touch the leg closest to you. It's the broken one."
She moved again and he heard the glass of the closest ring, felt her empty hand come down hard on his leg, twisting and shoved his hand across to catch her wrist. Their arms met, the knife hit the wall behind his head, snapped, and he butted her in the jaw. They twisted together on the floor, rolling on the glass and scrabbling like starved animals, clawing and biting at one another. Falling apart from the fruitless exertion, he leveled an accusation at her.
"You're not alive."
"And your leg isn't broken."
"How long?"
"A day, two. Yourself?"
"Three weeks." The anger in him cooled, recessed as his instinct for survival uncoiled with the new thing within him.
"So we can't eat them, can we?"
"No. We can't."
"I've only eaten once. I'm starving. Ravenous. What happens if we don't eat?"
"We start turning into them. We get stupid. Our senses get very sharp, but instinct takes over -worse than a comedown off crack. Bare minimum we need to eat three times a week. If we can manage to eat everyday, we'll heal a bit. Look human."
"Who says we aren't?"
"Haven't you noticed that you don't think of humans as people already? They're food, they hold for us, guard jealously to themselves, the key to our life. It's the infection or whatever, it's changed our brains. Probably some hormone or another is overproduced or not produced, it's changed the way we think, what we feel."
"Hell, maybe it's Voodoo."
"Might as well be. So, Celine. Nice name, I don't care if that's the name you had before or if you made it up to get close to me. I'm Mik now. I don't care what the people who birthed me told the nurse, that guy is gone."
"It was Michelle."
"Fuck that. Forget it. You're not human anymore, you're some fucked up predator who needs live flesh to keep yourself together."
"Takes one to know one."
"Abandon that shit, drop it all. We don't need to be nasty anymore, we don't need to try and manipulate each other. It's us against everyone, because our wandering stinking future brothers are mindless and useless, and the living are gonna shit fire when they find out we exist. Sure, they'll be scared at first, but then they're gonna see us for the threat we are and they are gonna make god damned sure they incinerate us and pound the bones into dust, which they'll probably mix with battery acid when they're finished."
"You've been alone too long. OK, we're predators, probably not technically human anymore, but there's gotta be a meaning beyond animal survival. Once that goes I'm buying myself a one-way ticket into a running wood-chipper."
"Fine. Whatever keeps you motivated. How about company-in-kind? You and me, nothing else I know is like us. Let's see where this goes. We'll play a game. We'll call it, 'How Many Days And Nights Can I Keep This Shit Up.' and God'll give us a nice fat lie to keep us quiet when we land in hell because of the disease he created."
"How about you and I stick together so I can smack you around for philosophizing. Let's go hunt."
"And reason speaks."
"By the way, I like it when you're nasty -reminds me why I was a lesbian."

Exercise in Futility

Ran into a novel idea -posting fiction on a blog instead of the details from my own life. The fiction, naturally, will come from the details of my life but drawing the connections backward hardly seems like an exercise anyone wants to attempt. So. Friction posts Fiction.

Initial

Up and along for BSU-E.T.C.