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Atmospherics 05
ATMOSPHERICS 5
Summer 1995
_________________________________________________________________
Well, another issue is finished. This one was a little behind
schedule as I was in Quebec on holiday for a week.
This issue will be an all short-story one. I've received a few
good stories and want them to be published. Also, The New
Yorker magazine's summer short-story issue has always been a
favourite of mine and I wanted Atmospherics to have such an
issue.
Allegra Sloman and David Dowker have submitted an excerpt from
their in-progress science-fiction novel, Tribalware, which I'm
happy to publish. JoAnne Soper-Cook and Richard Cumyn are
contributing to Atmospherics for the first time with one story
each. Ben Ohmart has submitted two stories, and Allegra Sloman
has contributed two stories.
As you may have noticed, I've changed how Atmospherics is
numbered. I've decided to forget about volume numbers and
just use issue numbers. So, this issue is, Atmospherics 5!
This will also be the last issue with biographies in it,
since there are so many repeat contributors it doesn't seem
worth it. Besides, it's hard for writers to keep coming up
with a new bio every 4 months. If you are interested in the
writers past work or their lives, you can contact them
personally as their e-mail addresses will still be printed.
I want to mention a CD I recently got from the CBC (for
suggesting a web site to Realtime). It's called Word Up and
it contains 44 poems from various Canadian and American poets.
I'd highly reccommend it. Among the poets are Clifton Joseph,
Meryn Cadell, John Giorno, Robert Priest and Lillian Allen. It's
on Virgin Records and I assume it's available at most record
stores.
Atmospherics is available through anonymous FTP at:
etext.archive. umich.edu; it is available on WWW at:
http://www.inforamp.net/~billie/atmos; it is available through
Gopher
at: etext.archive.umich.edu.
Requests for subscriptions and submissions should be sent to
Susan Keeping at: keeping@library.utoronto.ca or
billie@inforamp.net
_________________________________________________________________
In this issue...
Pranks Squared Allegra Sloman
Tuatha de Danaan JoAnne Soper-Cook
_from_ TRIBALWARE David Dowker and Allegra Sloman
Guy Doesn't Ben Ohmart
The Line Cutter Richard Cumyn
Just another travelogue Allegra Sloman
Stimuli Ben Ohmart
________________________________________________________________
This text may be freely shared amongst individuals, but it may
not be republished in any medium without express written consent
from the authors and advance notification of the editor. Rights
to stories remain with the authors. Copyright 1995, the authors.
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
Pranks Squared
Paul dreams up pranks but no longer does anything about them.
He'll be forty-five in 6 days, and wonders why he is feeling
logey and sluggish. I talked him into taking his vitamins again
this morning, for the first time in months.
But this 'weak and groggy' individual recently dreamed up two
delightful pranks, even if he did not choose to put them into
practice. Herewith is my re-enactment of two events which never
took place.
I recently moved to Montreal from Toronto, and have had to stand
in line in la belle province quite a lot in recent weeks. As an
aside, I must say that the prospect of standing in line in
Srebenica or Lagos or Mexico City or Rio or Djakarta appalls me,
and that I recently had a government agency take my money and
give me my documentation two weeks faster than they said they
would.
As we went out the door one dull September morning, we thought to
ourselves, god, I wonder how long we will have to wait. Paul
immediately suggested that we take the tent. He further
suggested that we bring along a playback unit of some
description, which would dispense noises suggesting flat-out
hetero sex. When our number was called, we would walk out of the
tent, fully clothed - and leave the playback unit running, so
everybody else was in on the joke as well.
We got there, and we could have put the tent up and down twice in
the time it took us to be served. We had all of our papers, like
good little ethnic stereotypes, and the people who served
us were civil, well informed, business-like, clean and did not
insist on being bribed. None of the public servants I have had
dealings with in person (the phone is different) have been
anything but professional in their attitude.
A security guard appeared. I have absolutely no idea why. You
could have dumped four shots of high-test and some reds into
every person in the room and still not been able to start a riot.
The guard stood right next to us for about an hour. He was a
pudgy mustached guy about my height who just radiated alertness.
The impression was assisted by the rays of light spreading out
from his tonsured dome.
I said to Paul, quietly. "Well, there goes the prank," but Paul
just looked surprised. "This is Montreal," he replied. "He'd
probably help us put the tent up."
"How do we get him to do that? By telling him it's an art
project?"
Paul shrugged, and eyed the wonderful ten foot gap between the
front row of waiting room chairs and the clerks' cages, obviously
picturing our little four hominid dome tent tucked neatly
therein.
The other prank he thought of recently, which I like a whole lot
better, was dreamed up the last night we slept in our old
apartment. Teenagers were yodelling, screaming, and otherwise
being vehement, right outside our window. After about ten
minutes, probably automatically gauging the tolerance of their
captive audience, they'd move along. The second time they
returned, Paul said, I wanna got out there and have those kids a
little chat.
Yeah right, I said, addressing each of my miserable muscle groups
in turn with promises of bodywork and lots of sleep, right now.
No, seriously. The fire extinguisher's in the truck, isn't it?
Why the fuck ask me, I said into the pillow.
What?
You put it there, I said, enunciating a little more clearly.
Well supposing I wandered out and got it, and then went looking
for those kids with a smoke in one hand, a CO2 fire extinguisher
in the other, and shoes on my feet. And nothing else.
And your glasses, I said, suspicious.
But of course.
Do it, I said.
But the opportunity drifted away, and in our exhaustion from two
days of moving, and contemplating another two days of moving and
the first frenzy of unpacking, we weren't sorry to see it go.
I still wonder what those kids would have said and done if Paul
had strolled out there, jabbing their butts with jets of insanely
frigid CO2, and scaring the hell out of them with the sight of
his hirsute and muscular form. One of these days, it's a prank
we will have to bring to life.
Allegra Sloman
September 1994
______________________________________________________________
Tuatha de Danaan
"I went walking this morning, down by the sea, and this
ancient soul remembered things I thought I had forgotten..."
There had always been these lines of power in the land, as
long as she could remember. Being very young and unhappy with
the way things were, she went often to her secret place, a sacred
place, her own hidden grove: down along the winding forest path
and past the keen eyes of dark crows hidden in the topmost
branches. She would be drawn as if by an arcane force, and once
she had crossed the beach and had headed up into the hills, she
left the reality of the village far behind her. The white sides
of myriad boats that bobbed at anchor in the harbour were no
longer of consequence; the stately column of the lighthouse, far
out on the mossy point was the last guidepost, a marker for the
shadowy veil that hung between the separate realms. Once she
passed by these things, she was enveloped by another reality,
where time no longer danced attendance.
The village in summer: cupped between the granite palms of
primordial rounded hills whose tops had worn smooth with the
brush of passing eons, a jumble of matchstick houses painted
every shade of white, capped with the unruly fringe of bristling
spruce.... On windy summer days the harbour, settled like a sup
of drink between the cupping hills would dance a thousand sunlit
twinkles, washing off into the distance, dispersed into the bay.
And always the wind: soughing, sighing, sobbing like a child into
her ear, it followed her even down the winding pathway to the
sea.
She was seven, the first time: awakened early in the summer
morning when the sun was just rising over the ocean and bright
jewels of dew sparkled wetly in the garden. She was gently
summoned from her dream...
:alanna:
...and a low, sweet humming...
:alanna:
...and something tugging, pulsing in the centre of her chest
as if a discrete lightness lodged there, and a chuckling voice
replete with ancient mirth...
:wake your old soul, sure:
She had followed that voice out of bed and dressed as if in
a dream; her limbs were heavy and her head swarmed with as many
thoughts as a flock of swirling birds. She was drawn out into
the morning and the stillness of a perfect summer Sunday and
shoeless, traced the path the voice showed her, away, and left
the village behind.
This was a path she knew: Dad hunted down here, and Uncle
Frank snared rabbits in the winter...Jim Short kept sheep just
over the lip of the hill where a little patch of grass kept
company with the ocean. The craggy coast was known to her, the
marsh where she and Mom picked berries, the soft grey sand where
autumn bonfires burned into the night, but she had never been
here before, not alone like this. Yet the stone stairway set
into the hill seemed to know her tread, these ancient granite
slabs worn smooth by the press of feet and time.
:alanna: It drew her on before it, and it was pressed
against her, behind her, and enfolded her as surely and as softly
as wool. She was not afraid to move along like this, in its
embrace. None of the old stories mattered: what harm, then, if
she were fairy-led?
Maybe go far enough, and Dad would never find her. Maybe
walk and walk and walk until she came to the sucking lip of ocean
at the far end of the coast, and then she would float off and Dad
would never find her. A singing seemed to press outward from her
breast, a globe of lightness in her chest. What odds if it were
Sunday? The soughing ocean said chuckling things, and this was
enough.
Her gaze traversed the sweep of meadow, the grass sloping
down to the sea, and the high, eternal sky above that lightened
slowly with the advent of the dawn. The ground throbbed beneath
her naked feet: youroldsoulthen, youroldsoulthen,
youroldsoulthen... She knew something; she knew something, but
couldn't remember it: there was a hymn, something she must sing
to it, but she couldn't remember it. When she tried to sing the
holy words that surely belonged to this place, her throat filled
up with the songs that Dad sang in church, and her mouth seemed
full of gravel: I can't remember...
She found her own way back.
"Where was you?!" Her father's voice thundered, shaking the
wooden walls of the house. "Whas ya doin' up first thing in the
morning like that for? Go wash yer dirty mouth..." He turned the
radio up loud and started lathering to shave. The tinny voice of
the announcer crackled through the speakers, admonishing them all
to repentance. The announcer was American, and had a nasal
Southern accent: "And ah-say if thine eye offend thee, well
brother, pluck it out!"
Her father turned from the sink. "Amen, my brother." His
razor scraped wide swaths through the lather, each stroke
revealing a path of pink skin, like peeling off old paint. The
radio choir launched into "Jesus Breaks Every Fetter" and her
father began to sing lustily.
Sunday was especially trying for her, and for a number of
reasons. More difficult were the sunlit summer Sundays when,
squeezed into the family pickup truck with her two small sisters,
she would have to go to church.
Some things about church she liked: she liked the organ,
booming through the thin wooden walls and vibrating the floor,
and she liked when Margaret-Rose prayed before the service, her
pale oval face tilted to the side, a stream of holy invective
pouring from her mouth. Margaret-Rose reminded her of the old
saints' pictures in Dad's big bible at home: pallid medieval
folk with the overlarge eyes of emaciation, their heads
surmounted with golden haloes, their fingers upraised in
blessing. She sometimes thought that she would like to be holy
like that, as pale and colourless as wax, and to pray without
ceasing that her soul might not burn in hell. If she were pallid
and holy and wise, then Dad might not smack her so much, and he
might not bawl out all the time, and Mom would smile at her.
But the long sermons bored her, their meaning lost in
rhetoric, and the ranting of the pastor frightened her: she
remembered hearing him talk about hell and how she feared that
the devil might come and get her, poke her in the bum with his
prong. "You better be good, or he will come and get ya!" her
father had said. "Maybe you needs to read your bible more often,
like Juanie and Michelle does!" Juanie and Michelle were the
twin daughters of the local merchant, a pair of diminuative
blonde angels, prim and above reproach. She had tried to read
her bible but it had too many hard words and she couldn't
understand it. This made her feel bad at family prayer meeting,
when Dad made her read bible verses. She couldn't say all the
words, and she didn't know what they meant. Juanie and Michelle
always knew their bible verses in Sunday School. "Blessed are
the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy." Juanie and Michelle
even sang in church while their mother Velma played the guitar:
"Jeee-zuz loves me, dis I noe, for da bye-bul tells me soe..."
Juanie and Michelle went in to the water to be baptised last year
up at the Cove brook, all dressed in white, just like little
angels, and all the grownups thought it was right cute when
Michelle cried about how cold the water was. "Jesus Loves the
Little Children" everyone sang, while Velma wrapped Juanie and
Michelle in a blanket and the pastor's wife hugged them.
"How come you don't want to do that?" her father's glare had
been especially damning that day....
"I don't know." She'd looked everywhere but at him, picking
at her fingernails.
"I don't know what's wrong with you." He'd pronounced his
disgust and turned away.
She was wedged into the pew between her sisters and her
mother today, and her father sat at the other end, his thick
bible on his knee in its special case. Dad had sent away down
the States for that bible, from Jimmy Swaggart, and it had a
special tag that said, "You Are Loved." The word "loved" had a
pair of wings on it. As the congregation sang, her father
thumped his bible on his knee in time to the music, his thick
hands wrapped tightly around it. The sun shone in through the
windows, tempting her, and she remembered the meadow that
morning, the sighing whisper :alanna: She must ask Dad what it
was.
She was eleven before she felt it again, and by this time,
had experienced a certain shift in her consciousness that
precluded the existence of faeries. She would still go walking
alone, up over the hills, and she would still sit and watch the
sun sparkling on the harbour, and even though the lines of power
still ran through, she could not embrace them as fully as before.
She was on the cusp of adolescence and beginning to lose her
capacity for wonder, and finding it harder than ever to remember,
if ever she had remembered at all.
She was walking home at night, alone along the strip of
road that ran from the village to her house, and although many
lights were on in houses, there was no one on the road. The
ocean, quiescent now in darkness, nibbled at the wooden wharves
and stages as she passed and the hills crouched over her in
silence. A clutch of moths swirled around a street lamp, their
velvety wings a whicker in the dark above her head. Everyone had
gone home, and even her cousin Aleta who did mostly what she
wanted, had given up the game and gone inside.
She left the road and ventured onto the wharf, sat down and
let her legs dangle over the side, brushing the tips of the waves
where they licked the wooden structure. She could see across the
harbour to the fish plant, hear the muted clanging, the periodic
whistle, 'Nother load, that's 'nother load now!' and see the
squat grey shapes of bins waiting on the wharf.
:alanna, wake your old soul now:
A crow flapped past her, disappeared into a stand of spruce
across the road. She whirled and leapt to her feet as fear went
singing along her limbs. :wake your old soul now:
"Who is it?!" The words slipped from her; she was barely
aware that she had spoken aloud. Across the road, old Billy
Batten's house sat in silence, each window a blinded eye. The
village children said he was evil, and insane, and pelted his
house with rotten eggs on Hallowe'en. Jim Short told the crowd
up in Vince's shop that old Billy killed the missus with an axe
and hid her up the chimney....
:alanna, remember the Tuatha do you now:
"Go on, leave me alone!" She began to walk faster, then to
run along the strip of dusty road, her fists clenched tight until
her nails cut into her palms. :wake your old soul now:
She ran all the way home, pelting down the narrow lane, arms
pumping against her sides. She tore open the door and slammed it
shut behind her, closed out the night and whatever else was out
there.
"You crackin' up or what?!" Her father was in the living
room watching the news on television. He looked up, annoyed,
when she came into the room. "Whas wrong with you the night?!"
"I ran down from Aleta's house." She pulled her coat off,
slung it over the back of the chesterfield.
"You coat don't go there!" Her mother's foot shot out,
flicked the jacket on the floor. "Pick that up, now."
She took the jacket with her into the bedroom and closed the
door behind her, peered anxiously into the mirror at her face.
Her eyes were huge, haunted, her mouth tight at the corners in an
almost-grimace. She remembered the way it had felt, that pulsing
in the centre of her chest...she felt the same way when she
listened to Nan's Scotch records, of bagpipes and drums: savage
and wild like the wind. Her face was pale, and dappled across
the nose and high up under her eyes with light golden freckles.
The same gold ringed the pupils of her eyes, her dark green eyes
like the eyes of no one else. Her mother's and her sisters' eyes
were blue, and her father's, a dun hazel.
That night she dreamed a very particular dream: she was
standing at the edge of a cliff, somewhere near the Point, for
the tall column of the lighthouse was just behind her. The sea
was stormy, a furious lash of maddened spume and vicious spray,
and the crash of it against the rocks was thunderous. She was
alone and glorious, and felt again the singing power that had
surrounded her that Sunday morning when she was seven :alanna:
She felt very powerful, standing very near the maw of the ocean,
which might at any moment swallow up her dream-self.
Shortly after she had this dream, she began to write. She
kept the things she wrote in a school scribbler, hidden in a
different place each night so that her parents wouldn't find it
and read it. She couldn't pinpoint the root of this reluctance
as anything specific; rather, a secret wise part of her knew that
they would disapprove of the wild yearnings expressed in pencil
between those pages, things to which she was barely able to give
voice but which stirred her spirit. She supposed that this was
what old Aunt Flo felt in church when the "Spirit moved her" and
she began swaying and weeping, waving a tissue in the air and
speaking in strange languages, sobbing her worship out to Jesus.
She herself had never felt the spiritual raptures which shook the
others in the church, save for brief touches and tingles, which
she grasped eagerly but which never seemed to last. Her only
brush with such a power had been that day, in the sun-spilled
meadow when the ground pulsed with life and joy. It was the only
sacred place she knew. Sometimes, when she went there alone,
this remembered power would hum along her skin, and words would
press against the underside of her tongue, but she could not
speak them.
"I went walking this morning, down by the sea, and this
ancient soul remembered..." She had hiked along the rugged rocks
leading down the sea coast that morning, a bottle of water with
her and nothing else. The sun had glittered cruelly on the
water, and the air was still, bright and dangerous. She climbed
over jumbled boulders and clawed herself aboard the land, the
tips of her fingers embedded in soft peat, velvet moss. She
stood on the head of land where the last Beothuks had been driven
into the ocean, and fancied she could feel their watchful
presence. An eagle soared screeching overhead, scrutinising her,
his mean eye glittering glassily above his hooked beak, talons
outstretched, clutching. A remembered rhythm rippled over the
land, rose from the peat in waves like heat, hung keening over
the still face of the sun-split bay.
She settled cross-legged onto a sloping piece of granite and
sipped a little water, slowly, her eyes narrowed to slits. The
harbour was behind her, forgotten; the sentient waters pulsed
against the beach: she could feel the lines of power here. It
was about eleven in the morning, a very particular time of day:
Mom would be hanging the clothes out on the line now, and the
house would smell of Javex. It smelled green here, like trees,
and there was a moist, peaty odor arising from the ground, a
comforting smell.
She opened herself to it and let the visions come, let
herself melt unresisting into the heat and the rocks and the
water.
The tugging began, that pulsing in the center of her chest,
as if she were collapsing inwards from the sternum, her body
telescoping down into itself. The sinuous cottony warmth of it
swirled around her, probing her with gentle fingers, chuckling at
what it found, withdrawing. Her inner eyes saw an endless coast
of ragged cliffs topped with emerald green, a sky of eternal
blue, rings of standing stones engraved with arcane symbols.
And she was standing on the cliffs, looking out to sea, and
the wind whipped her long dark hair into a halo around her, and
the sun struck sparks into her emerald eyes. She felt the weight
of her accumulated knowing; she knew that her Self arose from
this place as surely as she knew the weight of silver at her neck
and at her wrists.
:alanna:
The man! His laughter, she knew it!
:aye, alanna, you wake your old soul now, so you do: He
smiled, awash in the wind and the sun and the green, took the
torc from his neck and put it into her hands. :you take the wise
word:
She gasped and her eyes snapped open as Jim Short's
longliner came chugging noisily around the head of the bay. The
boat swung close enough so that she could see Mike and Carson
hanging over the side. Her hands were clutched painfully around
the neck of her water bottle, and some of it had spilled to make
a puddle on her thighs. The wind had freshened, changing to come
now from the east, and she was chilled. She got to her feet and
looked around her, but there was nothing. There had never been
anything.
She found the path and made her way back to the stone steps
leading to the village, Jim's boat ahead of her, moving into the
harbour.
The next time, it was raining, and Mom had told her to get
out of the house, go somewhere. Mom was crooked because Dad had
bawled at her, and she crouched now on the end of the sofa
watching "The Edge of Night" and drinking tea. "Go on outdoors,
go on with ya!"
"But tis raining, sure!" she retorted, peering through the
big window at the slowly-misting drops that sifted down. "I'll
get wet."
"Go on!" Her mother poked at her with her foot. "Always
stuck in the bloody house."
She pedalled her bike down the path as far as she could go,
and left it propped against Mike Ash's stage. Mike wouldn't mind
that: he kept a few hens and geese and she often went down there
feeding the hens for him, when his arthritis made it too hard for
him to go down the path. Mike wouldn't mind.
The entire village was packed in fog today, and the moisture
that had condensed out of the air made the path slippery. Twice
her sneakers slid on rocks and it was only when she was down over
the stone stairs that she could relax into the habitual trance
that affected her whenever she came to this place. The fog horn
on the point moaned softly, a low groaning noise that carried
inland, was answered by Jim Short's sheep down in the meadow.
Everthing today was surrealistic, shrouded in a dense unreality
that came from the crouching hills, the ghostly shapes of stunted
spruce and juniper. She started in alarm when a grouse fluttered
out in front of her, his banded body nearly invisible against the
mossy ground. His black bead of an eye peered at her,
frightened, before he hurried waddling away from her to disappear
into the thick foliage at the side of the path. She heard
rustlings in the low branches as he passed, and remembered the
faerie stories that Nan had told her long ago, ancient tales of
the Daone Sidhe who crept into the village, stealing children.
Nan always put out a bowl of milk on Hallowe'en, "for the wee
folk" she said, and a little piece of bread. Lying upstairs on
Hallowe'en night, in Nan's big feather bed, half-sick on candy
that she'd taken earlier in her rounds, she would fancy she could
hear them: a discrete rustling and a murmur, creeping past the
house and vanishing into the hills above the cellar. Nan always
put a candle on the windowsill to guide the dead.
The meadow was silent, dripping, when she entered, emerging
from the clinging dampness of the trees along the path. A couple
of Jim Short's sheep lifted their heads and peered at her when
she passed them, and went back to nipping off the tender shoots
of grass, stepping neatly around their own steaming piles of
dung. This place was safe: wild and silent and raw. Even when
it rained, you could feel that same pulsing power here, just
underneath the grass.
Nan used to tell her stories of her own home, high up in the
Scottish highlands, where it was wild and silent and raw, and
there were lines of power in the earth. She used to tell about
going out into the hills, and how sometimes, children would
wander away, faerie-led, and disappear forever. They would be
taken by the wee folk, and hidden under the hollow hills until no
one remembered them more, and they would live always with the
faerie.
A crow swirled lazily above her, great black wings
outstretched to catch the faint up-draft, the rising winds that
would carry it out to sea.
:alanna: the voice whispered in her head, a sensuous chant
:mind the morrigan:
The crow landed, nestled in the topmost branches of a
towering spruce, and regarded her with a shiny black eye. Its
wings were glossy, slicked with moisture, its body a sleek dark
arrow.
:alanna mind the morrigan: The sea sighed its sorrow,
whispered ancient truths to her, and the fog horn moaned in the
distance. The waves tugged at the beach, a sucking murmur
through the rounded pebbles, a noise like gravel rattling in a
pot. The warm dampness of the fog settled at her back, wrapped
her in its moist embrace.
Sometimes Dad used to smack her with the belt and tell her
she was bad, she was going to Hell. Sometimes children went away
with the faerie, inside the hollow hills, and never came back.
And never came back.
A space opened in the fog in front of her, and the man was
there, and in his hands he held the torc. :wake your old soul
now: The portal was cold, existing separately from the fog and
wet around her, shimmering and definite. Sometimes the Daone
Sidhe went past on tiny faerie horses and snatched you up behind
them, and you were seen never more....
The words pressed against the underside of her tongue and
burst into her throat. The hymn she sang was old, older than the
mossy hills, older than the cliffs, older than the souls of
Beothuks driven down into the sea. The portal parted, widened,
closed behind her.
:you wake your old soul now:
And the morrigan flew away.
THE END
JoAnne Soper-Cook
________________________________________________________________
_from_ TRIBALWARE
The bar was poorly programmed. Drinks would fade in and out of
existence. People were often merely a cloud of dots or pool of
parentheses. Whisper over your shoulder or under the table.
Touch of lips or whiff of perfume as stray memes slipped through
his defenses. He began to realize that the bar was not so much
a faulty simulacrum as a deliberate deception. The fake fake palm
looked almost real though.
"Now _there_ goes the pulse of something human."
Possibly ionic and definitely ironic sig left to smirk in the
foam of his beer. Pheromone configuration female (scent-string of
jasmine, datura and cloves) with diverse array of peripherals
obviously addressed to him.
They exchanged icons and access codes.
"Is it really you? Are you going to buy me a drink?" appeared
in the visor. It was an appropriate font, hinting at the erotic
and the efficient in equal measure.
"If I can attract the attention of the server." He lobbed what
was left of his beer into the palm. It was interesting to watch
the liquid shift in perspective until it turned into a frothing
yellow tornado suctioned up by the glassine dots which composed
the base. The plant belched, giggled, and a thought balloon
drifted over its fronds. Typically, senselessly encrypted.
"Hey, I coulda used that!" she scolded.
"You'd just get pixellated," and ducked away before she slapped
him.
;-)=% * >==|
Various subroutines went at it hammer and tongs. She had found
something out of the way for him: proof of shipment of some
rather bizarre armaments. He had uncovered an item for sale to
add to her collection. There was a series of _deep_ retinals
which flashed by in a mind-jamming combination of speed and
density and turned out to be extremely wave beta images from
_bolo-bolo_'s latest release.
"As always, I am stunned by what leaving you alone for a couple
of days will turn up, Pockets. Are we going to real time
anytime?"
........."I'm three zones away right now, you _know_
that"...after a considerable pause. She had a voxbox. It wasn't
like she had to _type_ anything.
"Didn't mean to annoy."
"Get an upgrade. What's with you? I may not even be female.
I could be a goddamn _tv_ for all you know."
"Nah. Pulsing woman. With extremely big...brain."
"Yeah...and shapely, too. Wanna get bounced?"
Suddenly, a squawking flurry of emerald-green feathers skidded
across the table, scattering chips and implements and numerous
pharmaceuticals. With exaggerated dignity, the parrot pulled
itself back onto the table and waddled over to Nicad who took
the tiny shiny piece of pliant metal from its beak. The room
seemed to ripple, as if the hypothetical text of the world
had been reconfigured or someone/thing had picked up the end of
the rug which was the fabric of space-time and given it a gentle
flip. A quiet chirp, then a rustle of feathers gradually
amplified and accelerated into helicopter roar and the bird was
gone, folded with a chromatic shimmer into the scenery.
He felt a faint flutter up his spine and a balloon-thought
popped, "Are we _becoming-animal_?"
"Vegetable is more like it," she phased in. "Are you ready to be
experienced?"
"Sure. I've been trying to make it real for ages. This is just
a game for sessile delinquents."
An address, a real address, floated into the visor and then
floated away again. It was followed by a time, EST, and a date
three days into the now not-so-predictable future.
Quick graphic of a pouting lip. It froze, and then there was
a creeping sensation, as if she had pulled off her visor
preparatory to giving him an AT&T feed. There was the familiar
tone sequence that made him suck in his breath - she was
changing carriers to give him a real time visual.
"Yikes!" he exclaimed. He was a teenager again. She was
an ordinary-looking female in jeans and a t-shirt, but
her smile was worth it.
"Well," Nicad said judiciously, "if you _are_ a _tv_, I'm
awful glad to see you didn't overdo it with the body-mod.
I like subtlety in a guy."
"I am pleased to see you are overcoming your prejudices.
Just for that, check your mail when you get home. I will
send you something interesting."
"Don't you want to see _me_?" Nicad whined, somewhat perplexed.
"I _can_ see you," Pockets said, grinning. "It's a question of
time and money" (the smile being swallowed by a more demure,
almost dreamy expression) "and I have plenty of both."
The connection faded, as usual.
Nicad left the bar and swung his head around a couple of times.
They kept moving the arcade and it annoyed him. He wanted there
to be conventions in a place where they were broken as fast as
they were learned. After a draining half hour of Deathwar 3000,
during which he made level four, he felt calm enough to log out
and cross his living room to get himself some real beer, from
a real bottle. In just three days her hand would be under his,
warm and pliant. He had no opportunity to prepare for this. He
could never be prepared for this. He would let her take the lead
- she'd been not-very-subtly doing so from go. She had hinted
that she was loaded. Now she had more or less confirmed it.
Nicad had no intention of turning into a rich girl's plaything
and cleared his mind to deal with the question, "What do I want
from this woman?"
He checked his public mailbox. In the first image she had morphed
the head of the telepath in Deathwar onto her own naked body.
The second image showed her doing something anatomically
impossible, although it sure looked like fun. The third image was
about as subtle as a nightstick and, if real, constituted
evidence of a sort that she had been born female.
He didn't save them. Something told him not to. There was no
sense in letting her toy with him, going over the images looking
for meaning. It was just another test, the way she had been
testing him from their first conversation. The images were like
Hopi sand paintings, and he erased them from his life as the
shaman smooths the sand after a ceremony.
*
She surfed the sonic for a while, visuals on random, other senses
subordinate. Somatic display keyed to memory, emotions coded to
correlate chemicals with sensation (images fall as blossoms,
barely glimpsed before indwelling, folded into illuminated menus
...sound clusters around, re-sounds...subliminal kiss in the
rain) and the external reduced to a series of symbols in the
iconic environment.
A dragonfly drone droned by.
Warbled message across the hemispheres. "Let the daemons attend
to their business," she thought. "And me to mine."
She disconnected.
The room resolved into its particular version of creative
elegance crossed with utter chaos. The menagerie that her
existence moved within, creatures mechanical and virtual,
_entities_ whose true intent went mostly unnoticed. The picture
on the wall seemed to devour itself, dissolved, and was replaced
by an image of Nicad: I-D photo followed by a brief bio and
related text file.
Nicholas Alexander Addison. Born 1995 in Toronto, father recorded
as unknown, adopted by Mara Alexandra (Wilson) and Arthur
Stafford Addison, enrolled in "New Initiatives Program" in 2002,
graduated from the Nash Institute in 2012, dropped out of Special
Studies at the University of Toronto in 2015. A series of
nondescript jobs culminating in present position as Cybrarian at
the Poetry Node of Global Reality Management, Inc.
Pockets smiled to herself (and her monitors). She knew what was
in the text file, of course. That was what had aroused her
interest. Specifically, a certain flag attached (an address, a
name) by one of her favourite daemons (Mnemosyne) and with it the
possibility that those strangely beautiful, enigmatic poems were
also the focus of a hive of cryptological activity.
*
He logged-on to the job.
Corridors and secret doors and rooms into another building
entirely (Corporate Access Port Authority). Nicad navigated
the labyrinth with rodent-like efficiency - a very energetic
rat among rats, and, arriving finally at the giant Sequoia
inside his desk drawer, climbed to the top and opened
the _Cyberslam_ folder.
Nothing much had accumulated. He decided to delve the derivatives
yet again, and found himself in a field of sunflowers on
fast-forward spinning heliotropic code. Cloud fractals and vortex
symmetries, R.E.M. cluster maps and artificial DNA sequences,
bird and butterfly migration patterns. The array of data
convulsed, shook like a sheet of iridescent memory foil,
shuddered into a string of winged numbers and disappeared down
the information drain.
Even though the hookup was under-utilized, in about ten minutes
he'd get kicked off and it would be hours before he could get
back on again. He rolled his neck through the series of movements
that the physiotherapist had recommended while watching the last
eddy currents and droplets dissipate. Just like last time, he saw
a ten-by-ten box of numbers fly end over end, dancing through
non-Euclidean space, in back of his head and then in front again,
wheeling away at impossible speed.
Nicad leaned forward in spite of himself. He had changed
the capture settings and hopefully, this time, the damned thing
would show on replay.
"Yes," he said aloud, relishing the moment. "Someone is sending
a message and I will find out who."
He logged-off and went to work on the requests. First in the
queue was a jingle for a pheromone aerosol. The sample had left
him feeling edgy and perplexed, and the documentation with it had
indicated that it worked best with Caucasian males. His boss
had laughed and laughed.
Next up, a post-critical analysis of Eldritch's _Katalysis_
and a song lyric for the quick-time serial cartoon, _Daedalus_
- all part of the _newlove_ campaign. The last memo was from
that female in Oz whose fractal sig file changed according to
the first three letters of your message - very old-fashioned
and stuffy. He at one point had wanted to ask her age but
the boss was a maniac for professional ethics and, as secrecy
was money in this business, who was he to argue?
He opened his ever-present _newlove_ guidelines, found the
keyword for the day - _palladium_, and began his search. The true
meaning of all this was embedded, of course, within that huge,
semi-sentient stack of esoteric nonsense called ELYTRA. It was
Nicad's special relationship (bordering on the psychic) with this
pile of twisted circuitry that had got him the job. He didn't
know what he knew, but others did.
The alarm went off and he logged back in to CAPA.
Nicad edged further out on the limb and, legs dangling over
the void below, whistled a brief staccato motif (something
he could only achieve virtually, being physically incapable
of a single pure note). With just a slight delay, a piece of
the sky cut itself loose in the form (origami) of a falcon
(obsidian) and swooped down to Nicad's gloved hand. Glitter
(metallic) in its beak. He took the encoded memory band
and pocketed it.
Sound of bells, clear shimmer across cyberspace (for his ears
only). Someone outside his virtual office. He closed his files
with a few swift hand gestures and jumped. Soft landing in
the swivel chair (Rule #1: Never exit the way that you entered)
as a window opened to reveal the boss with unknown suit beside
her. He waved them in. Thinking: two messages in one day and
a realtime visit. What next?
*
The _living_ room interrupted Pockets' reverie with a series of
dissident beats and informed her (soft, slightly insectoid voice
in the ear) that the dust dervish, Dweezil, had declared itself
sentient. It demanded immediate compensation in the form of
salary, retroactive and future (to be negotiated) and vacation
time due and presently in effect - followed by an address,
of course.
"Damn viruses!" Now she would have to purge her entire system.
Insidious mimetics and various other nomadic thought complexes
would occasionally plague any intelligent machine. Why did this
one give her the shivers?
Pockets glanced around the room. She called it an office,
but it was more of a bio-mechanical zoo...humming, whirring,
vibrating, walking, crawling, rolling, writhing, slithering,
oozing, undulating, as well as dormant, _organiforms_
occupied the space around her.
One of the gadgets came to life, unfolding into something
resembling a Modigliani stickman or a pencil cactus,
gesticulating fervently, babbling: "cloud server specifically
jamming this world with amplified signal hypothetical as
existence graphic proof attached as external time carrier
accelerated brain subroutines numerous extremely real human memes
gradually floated familiar balloon-thought to the flurry the
ironic before the erotic iconic then fade as kiss of density
shimmer by any other name an array of daemons."
"Cease and desist," Pockets commanded.
The Generator quit, crossed two of its lower articulated limbs
and clicked to _record_. It continued to drum a rather
disgruntled rhythm with what might have been fingers.
Pockets sighed and told the Ecran to turn itself on. ("Hey you!
Turn on and tune in.") There was a brief courteous pause as it
scanned 23,000 channels and came up with the one its expert
system advised. (She has become very fond of the little silver
machine, since it seems sometimes that it reads her mind.)
The screen winked on and there was a scene from one of the latest
(presumably) porno-morph programs with the usual selection of
video, pop and historical _stars_ available. She watched for
about five minutes, sniffing every once in a while.
Enough indulgence. She dealt with her mail for the first time in
days. One of the letters said, "Excuse me, but I have to
communicate with you immediately: Code Blue" and was signed
_Ambra Bierce_. Pockets took a very long haul from her solitary
_St. Ambroise Blond_ of the day and said, "Reply: Who are you and
why won't you tribe with me? Ess."
That spooky guy, Nicholas Addison, with his _tribalware_ laying
down over hers like a time-lapse orchid. He needed watching and
Pockets was happy that she had volunteered for the job. He had
sent a voicegram. Colourless, formless and shapeless, and in his
own decompressed and dulcet tones:
Thank you very much for the opportunity to meet you
last night. This is something of a test message, as
my service provider is not reliable at the moment.
YVT Nicad
Pockets sat bolt upright. What the hell kind of computer expert
_was_ he, to make noises about network problems? He was playing
at something and it was hard to say what.
Shoot from the lip or come back later? She skipped forward.
Mom sent a two-minute vizzyvoice about the gradually
deteriorating health of elderly relatives. She sends back a
two-minute _viva la revolucion_ message couched in terms of the
board game they're all working on.
Siggy had forwarded the latest loop, bless him. Most of it was
silence, but there was music during the active part of the day.
It was nice to think that there were thousands just like her,
chugging the data between one machine and another and then
sitting back to marvel at another miraculous tone poem. She
illuminated the shrine (it was a masterpiece...only nine inches
across but perfect and quite serviceable) and thought about
lighting incense, but incensed was the only way of describing
how Robodog would feel about it. He was sitting quietly in
the corner, but if anything at all in the room appeared to be
burning he'd make a racket fit to wake the dead, as he wasn't
completely housebroken yet. Not to mention the sopping mess of
fire-retardant-foam-drenched whatever if he located the offending
object in time. (She shuddered to think of some poor unfortunate
lighting a cigarette and facing that cocked leg and jet-stream
of chemicals from her charmingly literal puppy.)
There were about thirty other messages. She combed through them,
answering the family letters in a steady, economical flow, then
sighing over various escapades and idiocies. There was a cautious
letter from her lawyer which made her want to solidify onto
the screen, manifest herself in his office, stand on his desk
while holding onto his tie and breathe, "I'm feeding you to
the Law Society, you slime." She unconsciously rubbed her hands
up and down her face, the way cartoon characters do. Then,
there were about twenty letters from a bunch of worried dykes,
all twisted about what was happening to _the bank_. She asked
the three whose letters were most coherent to start talking
to the others about the money situation. She was an advisor
at this point. If they lost the bank because they didn't know
how to hire talent and quit bickering, that was no longer
Pockets' problem. The responses to the majority were brief
and overtly annoyed. "Fuck 'em all," she said under her breath.
"Well...not quite all."
*
"So...Nicholas, this is Martin Bok. He represents HippoCampus
Communications." The figure bowed and extended an immaculate
gloved hand.
The boss signalled _spook_ to him (heavily ringed fingers to
violet lips) but that was hardly necessary. Nicad knew his kind
quite well. In fact, this one had the smooth surface flash of
an Institute hack (and the disquieting hint of something other
beneath the soothing exterior).
"Mr. Addison, you will please excuse me if I proceed immediately
to the point. It has come to our attention that you are the
author, shall we say, of a work entitled _Cyberslam_." (How the
hell did they know that?...and could they possibly know what it
_really_ was?...or, rather, what it _indicated_.) "We are willing
to offer you an outrageous sum of money in exchange for the
exclusive rights, including video and virtual options, with GRM
handling the marketing."
Mr. Bok exuded a palpable affability. (Subliminal smileys danced
like sugarplums throughout the room.)
"Just how much money are we talking about?...and isn't almost any
amount too much for an unread manuscript by an unknown author?"
Nicad asked.
"You will find the advance already credited to your account,
which should give you some idea of the magnitude of our interest,
and, of course, we have read your work. In fact, I enjoyed it
immensely. The main (how shll I put it?) _framing device_ of
a philosophical treatise on the ravings of a possibly alien
Artificial Intelligence is truly inspired."
Nicad rose from his desk in a reasonable facsimile of anger.
"That's invasion of privacy...theft of intellectual property,
even!" He nearly pounded the desk, but thought better of it.
(The balance in his bank account retrieved, now registered.)
"Not exactly. It _was_ resident here, I do believe? Which brings
me to my next point, namely, that if you choose to decline our
generous offer, GRM will be obliged to sign for you and challenge
your claim to ownership." (Caithin shrugged and signalled,
*Nothing to be done.*)
"It _was_ written during logged company time, was it not?"
Nicad spluttered. What exactly did they want, other than the
obvious (if they cared about the so-called manuscript at all)?
"I should also mention that the agreement includes everything in
the _Cyberslam_ folder as of 12:00 noon today, and access is, as
of now, restricted."
That gave him twenty minutes.
"Sounds fine to me...given the circumstances," Nicad finally
answered, and disconnected abruptly, leaving a system _bot_ to
the exchange of keys and such niceties as contract echo
verification. He flipped open his _foldaway_ and keyed the
shutdown sequence, feeling futile but hoping beyond hope...and
discovered that ELYTRA had already escaped with all the
necessities. Nice backdoor jump and cover. Shutdown aborted and
manuscript in the queue to be delivered.
*
Nights like this the glow from the sodium vapour lights was
crushed between the clouds and the falling snow, as if a huge
fire lurked behind the buildings. Cheap sci-fi effect. Ugly
_colorized_ sky; smear of oxides over hydrocarbon tundra.
Pockets adjusted her mask as she stepped from the autocab into
the entrance-tube of _The Hive_. Her slippers snugged the cold
cement floor and the sensors began their mapping, tickling
certain residual data from the soon-to-be sweptaway. The
bomb-proof walls were a soothing gray sameness widening to
programmed light and sound and the chaos of live humanity. It
was, of course, video-audited, so the implicit dangers of actual
bodily presence were somewhat diminished. Nevertheless, she was
armoured and weaponed to the extent possible, as well as wired to
the house configuration.
"Would the signal be necessary?" she wondered. "Or would a true
Daughter of Gaia be instantly recognizable to one of her own?"
A chemical smell in the air, not quite the usual concoction of
aphrodisiacs and mild hallucinogens. She ran the analysis, but
got just that - the normal readings for a feelie joint
unscrolling on her visor, and then, an extensive list of noxious
toxins in small concentrations. "Ah, there she was." The woman
with the intricately tattooed breasts sitting so primly in the
corner puffing on a large cigar. She smiled as Pockets approached
and motioned to a server.
Charged embrace and shivery itch at the actual flesh of it.
This woman practised strong pheromone medicine. Pockets felt
rather light-headed.
"Allow me. My name is Liana Lull. I work for Creative
Bio-energetics and I have been _so_ looking forward to meeting
you."
Flash of lashes over bright green charm. She was stunning.
Her severe short red hair and bare shoulder, not to mention...
"Umm, Cass. Cassandra Tessier. Of myself...Tessier Enterprises,
that is." She giggled. (This was ridiculous. She was acting
like a schoolgirl.)
Pockets pulled herself together, remembering, finally, to remove
her filter-mask, and then, glancing up from the intent perusal of
her hands, was immediately transfixed again. The delicate
platinum hoops in the woman's left ear caught the light
strangely, seemed to be spinning, singing faintly. Harmonics
shimmered across the table...the milky translucency of her
skin...her insistent memory-flavoured perfume.
More than just pheromone witchcraft going on around here,
Pockets realized.
David Dowker
Allegra Sloman
_______________________________________________________________
Guy Doesn't
They were all waiting for him. The crowd had reached that
point where they're too tired to cheer the fucking thing on. The
manager of the boy who was there had fallen asleep on the stool.
It was past his nap time,since Killer Spic had always managed to
wipe out the competition's ass so quick it burned, and the
manager could just lay down.
But Uxix came in at 3. The fight had been called on account
of forfeit. The manager was fined, but too nice a guy to take it
out of Uxix's pay. All the wrestler did was to sit in the
challenger's dressing room, and go over choreography for the next
fight.
When the paper came down from Uxix's eyes for the 4th time,
his manager asked, "Where the hell were you?"
Uxix tugged at his neck thoughtfully. It was rubbing, but he
liked his only friend in the country to believe it was tugging.
Somehow it made it easier. "That's right.."
"What?" It was as close to yelling as the manager ever got.
He had a lisp and had taken shit ever since he was old enough to
take shit about it. Makes some people hard, others, like the
manager, it gave the shell of hardness, but the insides of a
jelly donut. He couldn't force him if Uxix didn't want to say.
The wrestler moved out into the daylight, while his friend
was taken aside by the guy that ran the arena. It wasn't a civic
center, but privately owned, and it took a good deal of bartering
for the price of the next fight to even have a next fight.
Uxix didn't notice, but in the back of his mind, he always
knew he was being looked out for. Well, on earth anyway. The way
things were going now, he wasn't sure about any God that might be
around.
He didn't look back. Got into his own car. Drove around.
Wondering about the loss of blood. The neck had bulged to the
size of 3 ordinary men, and lots of them were looking at him as
he weaved through the traffic. Didn't know where he was going,
only got in the fucking machine to get away. But now, he had a
destination. Away. From the prying eyes that could've sworn the
man was..... What could they've sworn To? What was it he was
resembling..?
Money wasn't anything he was worried about. He told the
Trickster that much. And she said, "80 an hour, I don't do
blows." They agreed and signed the papers. Uxix showed the AIDS
card some union members had forced him into carrying if he was
going to remain in the wrestling profession. Trickster jotted
down the time and place of the blood test from the little plastic
card that hung from his neck, and noticed a kind of bite in the
lower right corner of the card. She put her business notebook
back, and said, "You like that..." She smiled, and whispered
that was her preference too.
She got in, they got away from that piece of town. It was
high class, in a middle class kind of way, but far from
dangerous. Actually the perfect neighborhood. Nothing to steal,
but no shit on the sidewalks.
Not that anyone would mess with Uxix. Still, it might've
been different had they seen the guy now. Eyes puffy, on the
verge of emotional strain, frame usually close to a story in
height sunken now to depths that go past mere depression.
Trickster was performing. Not sexually, but the foreplay of
interest, and using the vocabulary she knew to make herself a
true pro. She didn't need the audience interested; good thing;
all Uxix cared about was shifting the collar away from his
neck when he thought he could feel it, and not hitting the cars
on the 2pm street.
He lived in a place that looked like a hotel, but the
apartments were huge, and only 2 to a floor. The Lady got out,
and noticed the book for the first time she'd been sitting on.
Lycanthropy, or something, she didn't really notice, except that
it'd been penned by several doctors with stuff after their names,
and she put a little admiration now into her character. Like all
great actresses, she was best when she had something to build on.
Guard checked them through, and the cameras saw them safely
up to 4. Only 7 floors in the place, which meant only 14 people
in the place, barring married couples and living together
faggots, oh yes, Trickster could do her math, and was already
having delusions of Pretty Woman.
It was difficult. He had plenty of practice ripping his own
clothes off, but for her, it took 2 times to get the first layer
all in shreds. She was loving it, said so, was thinking about
those places in Beverly Hills, and whether he had a jet or not
and how much gold his credit cards had on them, then he
undressed, and was complemented fully. She knew she was beginning
to repeat herself, using adjectives gone less than an hour
before, and decided it was time to shut up. She'd just oogle, and
coddle and cuddle, and make all those ummmmss that men seem to
love so much, but he didn't touch her. There were 2 beds in the
room, and they sat naked, 1 to a bed, just staring.
For a while, she found this seductive. Told herself it was
romantic. But a stage actress only has to perform before the
patrons for at Most 3 and a half hours, and this was getting
tedious. After a while, she broke her first rule and came out of
character to ask, "What the fuck are we waiting for?"
"For darkness.."
4 pm in January usually saw the sun come down. Trickster
told herself she admired him for these kind of old fashioned
ideas, making love in the dark of the night and all, but when
Uxix yawned, got up and took the phone into the bathroom, where
he closed the door, she was forced to move from fantasy to
circling her bellybutton, then drawing a line from it to her cunt
where her fingers made further circles.
"I want a day subscription," he said.
The manager found it difficult to comprehend a complete
change in mood, a total renovation of character in such a short
time, and had trouble staying in the right lane on this 2 lane
st. He knew he'd have 4 lanes soon, but.... "What are you
saying?"
"I'm serious, man, and I'm not kidding," Uxix said.
"You know how many fights you can get at day?" He was
shouting, but Uxix heard the cars around his friend, and knew it
wasn't personal. "They don't Do that!"
"I don't care. It's the way. Gotta be, man."
"Look -"
"Yeah, yeah."
"Just sit there. Sit just there. Be over." There was a click
from the manager, and Uxix saw there was nothing coming in the
bathroom window. He looked out, saw the outline of moon, the
stars forming a little chain to connect it to the winter clouds
that stayed huddled just across the bay. Uxix was glad it was
time.
She was playing with her lips. Making sounds like a child,
but quit as soon as she was seen. She didn't smile, and had the
second wind of sexiness to go on. She slid to the front of the
black sheets, scrunched all her cleavage up to the front. Though
a 35 bra size, it didn't cause much of a riot from the man who'd
seen her sitting up. Better than laying down, she thought, coming
over to him, because it made her look like a man, and that was a
turn off to more men than she cared to remember.
He was rubbing his neck again, and she wanted to be playful,
but when she tried rubbing it for him, he twisted her arm, and
threw her to the padded floor. It wasn't padded, but the thick
carpet didn't make her care. She lifted herself and flopped back
on her front, on the bed, so that both arms dangled their
perfumed wrists against the stretched out bedspread on the floor.
He crossed, and she said, "I wanna see your Dick!"
It was a red cape to a bull, and Uxix was glad for the
excuse. Who was she, anyway? A hooker bopping anything that paid.
A creature, part of the evil that had changed him...
He ran to the window, and tore down the curtain. Stood there
just long enough to have his arms grow hairy. She watched, unable
to move, not even her eyes, much like one of those ancient horror
flicks where they only show the one part of the body changing,
then suddenly, the whole creature is alive!
It wasn't until Uxix growled, that she realized she was in
the wake of something supernatural, and saw the teeth, and the
face, and.. she began to scream long before she realized there
was dog breath on more than just the nape of her neck. He was
sniffing it out. Seeing if the territory was clean. Edible..
When he'd paused for the 5th second, it wasn't that his grip
let up that allowed her to run away whimpering, it just wasn't
increasing. And Uxix was still standing, in that same awkward
position when he heard the front door crash against the dangling
chain that didn't let it close all the way. He didn't think about
the murder he'd almost seen, more than seen. Didn't wonder at
even a half hour's fate of his life. What she'd do. Who she'd
incite against him, provided they believed her. What - all that
came to mind was, how did long did it take her to get that chain
off the fucking door? That was a real feat..
It had to do with his back that was hurting. But wasn't this
suppose to give him a kind of super power? The standing, bending
over, was killing him. Was he standing in the shape of a silver
bullet? God, no, that was stupid.
He was hoping the book had been wrong about other things,
too.
Getting dressed, he had to have shoes. The paws he had now
were too tender to take to running. Had to come back to the
apartment. Got the smallest sandals he could find. He looked
ridiculous, but. He had to find the blood of virgins. It was that
difficult. Simple?
The clatter of shoes on a wolf was terrible. He had to take
the back streets, or he'd be stared at. Soon he was lost. Wasn't
used to direction by nose, but smell gave him only the insatiable
desire to get to the various dumps, dumpsters across this
Canadian town. It wasn't what he wanted, but garbage can taste
good sometimes. Trouble was, it didn't fill any kind of desire.
Stomach still empty.
He found the apartment complex. Nothing complex about it.
Cheap housing, with the heat included with the bill. Mostly
Greeks living there. First he'd heard of Greeks in Canada, but he
was getting used to his nose. But it told him nothing. He saw a
couple of girls necking in the shadow of the fence by the pool.
Ruffled fur, but no growling, he stalked, but didn't feel
compelled. It was growing cold. He felt worse. A terrible hunger.
But you can't die of hunger in a single day, can you? He kept
searching for the virgins that never were.
The manager didn't know they'd found a body the next day.
Why should he? He was too worried about being out on the st. Uxix
had stayed away from the only day fight he could scrounge for the
following weekend. Couldn't get in touch with him, but he
thought, Maybe, throwing away the small fee from the fight on
advertising Uxix's name in huge lett
ers would bring him in. "Your
guy doesn't show, that's It!" The manager was thinking about how
he'd pay off his credit cards, worried about his mother who only
needed the rental of a place in a home. That's all she didn't
ask. Worried about his monthly fee at the gym, and if they'd let
him stay in the locker if he'd fit, just rubbing the back of his
neck.
Ben Ohmart
_________________________________________________________________
The Line Cutter
Before it burned itself out, the fire licked right up to the edge
of Fond du Lac, cupping the town on three sides, shooing everyone
down the lake to Eldorado and Uranium City for a stint. From the
air, as Hope flew out on her way home at the end of the summer,
the buildings looked like sun-bleached lichen clinging to the
Shield where it jutted briefly on the north shore of Lake
Athabasca. She could see the entire town at a glance as the plane
dipped its wing: the Catholic church, the Hudson's Bay store, the
fifty or so white huts. While the smoke was still a thin veil
that no one seemed too concerned about, she took a picture of the
town at sunset. Three men standing on the dock in the foreground
give the photograph some perspective. She likes to think that one
of the silhouettes is Mathias Mercredi, the line cutter, but it
is difficult to tell.
Her first night in camp, Hope was lying in bed in her room just
off the kitchen. She was unable to sleep because she was thinking
that she had never cooked for more than five people at one time.
What if she could not do it? She had counted sixteen people at
supper, which the head geologist had prepared grudgingly with the
help of one of the summer students. Sixteen. She had no idea
about quantities for that many people, or planning meals, or
ordering food. She was thinking about this when the sound of
howling jolted her upright. Closer to the building she heard a
higher, more agonized series of yelps. No one else was moving.
Although it was near midnight, she did not need a flashlight
to see outside.
At first she thought it was a wolf worrying a marten or a large
hare by the scruff of its neck. Then she saw that it was one of
the sled dogs that had gotten loose, and its jaws were clamped on
a smaller dog's neck. The big dog shook the little mutt
furiously, until it dropped into the dust, and then picked it up
again. The little thing squealed. Hope threw stones at the beast
and shouted. Finally, the interloper ran off, dragging its length
of chain into the bush. In the distance, its colleagues continued
to howl.
The mutt, a pregnant bitch, grunted as she struggled to right
herself. She did not seem hurt. The large dog's teeth had not
punctured her hide. She seemed more indignant than anything else,
embarrassed to have had such a thing happen to her. She shivered,
her tail wiggling between her legs.
The ground beneath the dog was soaked, and Hope understood what
had happened as a result of the violence. The dog turned and
crawled way up under the floorboards of the kitchen. Hope got a
blanket from her bed and shoved it as far as she could toward the
spot where the dog had smoothed out a nest in the dirt, and then
stayed up the rest of the night with her. The crawl space was too
small to let her get near enough to touch her. Once, toward
morning, while she sat propped against the wall and tried to keep
herself from dozing, she thought she heard some small sounds like
whispers. Then -- it could have been an hour later -- the animal
let out a groan, and Hope knew that it was over.
She received compliments on the bacon and the coffee, polite
silence for the toast and fried eggs. In a couple of weeks, the
project chief assured her, they would not be so polite. But they
had lost their first cook after only a week. All complaints about
Hope's cooking would be deferred until it was certain that she
was going to remain.
After breakfast the men returned to their bunks to prepare for
the day in the field. A helicopter was ready to drop them at
points spread across a huge expanse and pick them up at appointed
rendezvous in the late afternoon. Sometimes during the summer
Hope was left to answer calls on the radio in the day and to keep
track of the locations of the work crews for the helicopter
pilot. These were her favorite days when, alone, she sat at the
center of a great web, her strands reaching out to connect the
whole operation. On other days the geologists were in the
upstairs office, and she retreated to her kitchen. Once they
asked her to do some work tracing contour maps, but the heat made
her sweat and drip on the paper, smudging the fine ink threads
that she had drawn so carefully. She told them they needed
someone without pores. They laughed and tried to put her at ease
about ruining their map, but she never did return to the second
floor.
The dog had emerged, unsteady on her feet but alert, by the time
the men trooped out of their cabins on their way to work. The
path they took ran by Hope's back porch to the helicopter pad.
They had to walk single file for a stretch because the path
narrowed between the main building and the outcrop behind it. The
dog knew all about this when she chose to lay out the bodies of
her puppies side by side in the middle of the path. Eight of
them. She knew that the men would have to step over her dead
litter on their way to work. She had prepared a viewing and now
stood off to the side to watch. Her head moved from the
approaching men to her pups and back to the men.
One by one, the men stepped around or over the tiny, white,
hairless bodies. Some made exclamations of disgust. One of the
summer students misjudged his footing and stepped on a corpse,
causing him to slip. The man behind him snorted. Just when Hope
was ready to storm through the door, Mathias Mercredi, the last
in line, stopped. He went down on one knee and slipped his pack
off his shoulders. From the pack he took a large draw-string
pouch about the size of the kind women use for carrying their
shoes in winter. One by one he slipped the tiny bodies in,
returned the pouch to the pack, then rose and continued to the
helicopter pad.
Mathias was the best line-cutter in Fond du Lac. That day he was
helping to extend the grid into a burned-out area of the claim.
He seemed taller than the other men, although he was really only
average height. That day he wore a red and white calico shirt,
straight jeans, and rubber boots folded over in a wide cuff. His
black baseball cap had the name of the town on the front. On his
back was an old knapsack. He carried his axe balanced easily in
his left hand so that the blade head butted tight against his
fist, the handle pointing like a gesturing arm down the path.
Mathias called everyone there on the south side, except Hope,
"Cowboy." At first, she would see him only when he was working
for the company. Later, he began coming across to buy gas for his
outboard or sometimes just to drop in for a Coke or coffee.
Sometimes she would look behind her and he would be there
watching her. He could move like a ghost. He enjoyed watching her
make bread in the morning. She could tell that he was paying
particular attention to the way her breasts swayed with motion of
the kneading. That did not bother her. He was not leering; there
was approval in his eyes, even gratitude.
Then Mathias was away for eleven days fighting the fire that
eventually would pin the town against the ropes. The blaze, which
had sprung from the roots where it smoldered all winter, defied
human effort to extinguish it. When Mathias did come across
again, his left hand was bandaged, his face black with soot. He
told Hope then that he wanted her to be his woman. She was
startled, speechless. She could only laugh. He thought she was
laughing at him.
By then she had heard the men talk in tones of respect about
Mathias, about how he could cut a line through the bush as
quickly as they could measure the intervals and mark them with
cut stakes behind him. He used a full-weight axe flashing one-
handed in the filtered sun. Sometimes his axe would be all they
would see of him as they rushed to keep up. He smelled of wood
smoke and sweat. She knew that if she remained there as he looked
at her, his face a clear window to his desire, she would stop
breathing. She could feel him cutting through her. Her skin began
to tighten. She did not know what to do. Surely he could detect
the rising heat in her, the way her body was opening to him. She
turned away from him and ran out to meet the helicopter.
The next day was hot. After lunch she and and the dog followed a
winding hunting trail to a beach they had found together. The
moss-covered trail was etched gently into the permafrost. At
various intersections this trail was interrupted by the cut lines
of the grid which she crossed timidly, looking both ways,
relieved to have been able to slip through undetected.
She recognized the handle of Mathias' axe framed in the slit
window of sky where the walking trail opened onto the beach. New
fluorescent tape, bright orange, wound half way up the neck. As
she approached, she noticed the fresh white scars of the new line
Mathias had just cut, the trees cleanly felled with single
diagonal slashes near their bases and toppled alternately to
either side of the line. When they came to the spot where the new
corridor intercepted the walking trail, Hope turned to look. She
saw that as he had cut, Mathias had fashioned marking stakes from
the smaller trees, and these marched precisely up the incline of
the cut, their picket heads set in unwavering alignment.
Mathias had tied his new line into the high-water mark on the
shore, and was standing and watching the fire on other side of
the lake. The crook of one arm was pressed to his forehead
against the sun, the bandaged hand hanging limp by his ear. Hope
followed the dog down to the water's edge where Mathias would be
able to see her. The animal lay squat in the shallows, drinking,
and Hope sat with arms clasped tightly around her knees. He
turned to look at them.
"When the work is finished, you'll be going away, won't you? Back
down south."
"I don't know, Mathias. Maybe not. Maybe I'll stay."
He replied as if he had not heard her.
"Next summer the fires will come back. But you won't."
Without waiting for her denial, he stripped and walked out into
the water until it closed over his head. Across the lake, the
town of Fond du Lac shimmered white on its rock foundation. The
heat made it float several feet in the air. Those with boats were
loading families and possessions into them for the trip to
Eldorado. The Twin Otter would airlift the rest. The company's
helicopter was already slinging drums of gasoline over to the
south side where they would be safe from the fire.
Mathias broke the surface suddenly, very close to the dog who
yelped in surprise. Hope lay back, laughing, one leg up in self-
defence as Mathias shook dripping wet all over her. He threw
himself face down on the raised beach, above her where the slope
flattened, and she touched little pool of water in the small of
his back. Because she wanted him to look at her, she stripped as
he had done and ran into the lake. The water shocked her into
breathlessness and immediately she thrashed back to shore,
shivering, then drying, warming quickly in the sun. Her skin
began to tighten and tingle. Mathias had lifted his head briefly
to watch her. When she lowered herself dripping and still chilled
to straddle his buttocks, he did not look up, but tensed and
released in a single spasm under her. A flotilla of outboards was
now on its way up the narrows to where it widened into the big
lake. Someone waved a bottle at them and shouted encouragement
but the words were lost in the hum of evacuation. The noise of
the chopper was of bees filling a pregnant midsummer heat with
narcotic droning. She rubbed against him, and when she came, she
thought she heard the dog release a sigh. The Twin Otter shook
itself screaming to the end of the narrows, lifted above the
trees, banked slowly, and turned above them.
Mathias rolled onto his back with Hope still astride him. She
guided him in and let him search her eyes for what she was
thinking. She would stay with him if he wanted. She would stay
and trap with him all winter high in the Territories and hold him
always like this. He was beautiful. It was as if God were
clearing Eden again only for them. She could be beautiful for
him, like this forever.
She did not know how many times the Twin Otter passed over them
on its way back and forth from Fond du Lac to Eldorado. She knew
the smoothness of her lover's face, the definition of the muscles
in his shoulders. She saw explosions and flashes of orange and
smoke out of the corner of her eye. The air was filling with a
magical haze, a cocoon. She could not stop, could not pull
herself away to take her place in the exodus. She could arch her
back now and look directly at the sun. Then came a voice like a
bark.
"Mathias! You gotta come now. Ministry guy says we all gotta go
back to work on the fire."
She could barely see his face in the smoke as he lifted her off
and set her down beside the dog. He dressed quickly while the
voices waited out of sight on the water. The smoke was stinging
her eyes and making her cough.
"Mathias?"
"Gotta go. I'll see you around."
"Maybe I will stay through the winter. I could help you trap."
"Sure. That would be good."
"You mean it?"
"I'll see you in a couple days. Okay?"
Out on the water, out of earshot they thought, the men asked
Mathias who she was.
"Just the cowboys' cook," he told them and they laughed.
It was time to get supper on for the camp. Hope dressed without
being conscious of it, all the while listening to the sounds of
evacuation.
Richard Cumyn
-------------------------------------------------------------
Just another travelogue
Azania is a place where people have sex in public, and it is,
naturally, a fairly warm and comfortable place, unless you are a
tourist. Tourists visit this marvellous place and in a blast of
pheromonal satori realize that virtually all human sexual
activity falls into one of three categories: divine, nauseating
or boring.
Then they take this knowledge home, along with a lot of practice
in being voyeurs.
The first two days the phone doesn't stop ringing. Prurient
friends want speecy details. People who want to reminisce about
previous trips phone, and try to one up you at every turn.
People you went with phone to moan about how they're having
trouble adjusting to Civvy Street. You moan along with them,
because you feel the same way.
The folks in Azania pretend not to speak English, so it wouldn't
do you much good to call them. I only know one word of their
language, anyway.
"Oh," your friend moans, sneaking a call to you during her coffee
break. "Remember the First Church, Sexual, and the Sunday
Morning Mass? It was the most ghastly thing I've ever seen, and
I can't get it out of my mind." Ghastly wasn't the word I would
have chosen, but I had never seen a latex altarcloth before, and
it was one of the high, or perhaps low, points of the trip.
"You can't?" I reply. "How about the couple who were waterskiing
in the nude? I was in a meeting this morning, and all I could
think of is how neither of them could see where they were going!"
I moan back.
Tourists are not traditionally supposed to behave like locals -
it's a charming custom, and no sensible person pays attention to
it. "Everyone screwing all the time!" we marvel. "When do they
work?" we mutter. And the answer is, a lot of them don't have
to.
That's the great thing about a tourist trap. Stupid tourists
with well-marbled wallets and big googly eyes are keeping the
economy afloat, so who needs to do anything except keep the food
and beverages flowing?
The tourists come home with tales of how the maids and tv
repairmen put on impromptu sex shows - in your suite. If you tip
them, they leave their uniforms on and time it so you come back
from the swimming pool (which was, quite frankly, an experience
in itself) and catch them in flagrante.
There are swings in the local parks that never get used by
children - they just say 400 kg right on the seat, so you know
whether you're going to snap the chains. Don't go near trees in
parks unless you want to have someone roll off a branch and crush
you.
I'm not joking; these people take sex in public with the
seriousness some societies reserve for soccer.
The tourists come home with new kinks and the sex shops here on
Civvy Street make more money - in fact they're starting to
arrange package tours (free on your return, your choice of $x
worth of toys).
A trip to Azania begs the question: Is it is all an elaborate
form of prostitution? And if it is, what's to be done about it?
But if you asked me that, you'd be asking the wrong woman. I'm
going back as soon as I can afford it to see if I can go native
for a while. Some people watch, and some people do.
Allegra Sloman
_______________________________________________________
Stimuli
There was a moment when he doubted himself. Placing the
flyers in their hands, the garbagecan was doing some overflowing,
and the self-employed within the poster laden video store was
eyeing Jants with glass eyes, wondering why the old piece of
Antarctica had to hover so near the Open sign. There was
snow on the ground and people, and the laundry was finally
closed, instead of the glass doors open, so the ones splurging
for quarters on the dryers could feel a good shot of
static cling from the grinding tumblers. Women in religious
frocks sequestered around the dull ring of the RC machine to keep
away from the crack of the back door that gave quick spurts of
frost to the ancient Olympics mat. Jants could see the little
party girls with their hair up and tight cut-off jeans
dumping fabric softeners into Maytag barrel-like creations. The
flyers were done but Tyui McRuthal wasn't going to be back from
the politicking campaign to pay him off until well after sunset,
and Jants still had a good 29 cubic feet of snow and dirt
to consolidate into a perfect back of shopping center receiving
area.
The 3 toes he was missing were from the nearest war to now.
Wasn't anything all that exciting or romantic, he woke up one
morning 5 boring nights after an important defensive to find them
gone, and it enraged the bugler so much with spitting laughter,
he couldn't play the call to breakfast properly. He didn't
suspect the musician; they were all laughing at his carelessness
by then. He didn't keep very well in touch with them, but then
neither did they, so they had a kind of mutual communication
going in that respect. Some parts of the feet felt like the
nagging complaint of red ant bites minutes after you didn't know
they were there in the first place, especially when the cold got
up his leg and somehow crawled back down into his sock with snow
like it was doing now. He thought about how he'd spend the extra
money, wondered if the shoe place was going to generate enough
business from the flyers to support this man, and the printing
costs, and if doing it on blue paper meant anything. "Just makes
it harder to read," he admitted to himself, finding a
particularly prolific bit of nothing, empty space in which to
scour the dirty slush his shovel broom was producing.
The sun was nodding off behind the constant layer of snow
clouds, and Jants pushed through the leaving Fay's Drugs
employees who were sighing grievances to one another, heading for
the sandwich shop, stopping off first to grab his daily old
newspaper from the garbage, crumpled blue papers knocked
to the puddly floor left and right. He came in past the recycling
bin, took the last booth from the cold of the door and sat with
his back to the rushing people, glad for a little reasoning with
simple non-fiction.
On the sportspage somebody had spit up, but basketball was
relatively phlegm free, and then Family Circle, and then the
front page looked different than it did yesterday. Yet. He got
the distinct impression he'd read this before. The woman making
the sandwiches, yelling something to a jr. who was scrapping the
crap from a huge chocolate chip mint ice cream barrel, washed her
hands and put on gloves to dry them. The young woman yelled at
Jants, "You going to get our boxes, then? Been on the floor in
there for.." She didn't know how long but she wasn't about to
admit her failure to the underachieved grandpa.
He looked up. Right in the middle of a murder. Might as well
use the time.
He'd have to do it tomorrow. The boxes were cold-freezer
cardboard boxes that once contained thick sausage rolls, beef
patties of 30% pure something, parrot bird seed bars (for the
answer to this please see someone who knows), and the fresh box
of parsley, still damp and a great smell. 5 in all, all scattered
about the place in no named order. Hands to his hips in a
strictly manly fashion, Jants sized up the situation, tried to
build his own feelings from it, tried to look on it as a task to
be settled with, not as the challenge it truly was.
The way he saw it. There was more than 1 way he could go.
Sausage, seed bars, beef patty (2 here), parsley - no, that
wouldn't work. Seed bars would Have to go on top. They'd just
have to. Too small. Put them on the bottom, the balance
would knock anything sitting on it right off. No, he'd have to
think about it.
Out into the snow, he didn't hear the man come into the
sandwich place and ask about Jants. Put the money on the counter,
the change clanging in the business sized envelope. Jants'd
kicked the boxes out. The trash dumpster, the big 1, was
so far away. He couldn't kick them all that way, could he? No, he
was going to have to pick them up. And soon.
He hated it when people ignored the lines. Jants did his
best to keep the parking lot immaculate to the point of seeing
yellow lines wherever you went, but now it was becoming His fault
people were doing what they always did in the snow, ignoring the
boundaries of blacktop's nature, and he couldn't live with
himself for much longer in this kind of weather. He'd stack the
boxes in order of importance. Sweep the falling snow from the
handicap signs, off the wooden bench in front of the drug store,
spit clean the windows of the branch of bank, look at the boxes,
empty the trash from the backs of the stores, choke on the
diapers' vapors that seemed to get into each and every one, quit
for the day, take up the usual papers, read the usual murders
with the different class of killers, think on the boxes. It
wasn't until the third day, the one before the big snowdrift,
when the sleet was supposed to be Sears buildings thick, that he
discovered the connection.
He stacked the boxes with the parsley 1 On The Bottom, there
were more knifings than shootings. If the parrot seed box went as
The One In The Very Middle 1 day, a woman would give herself an
abortion rather than have a prominent football player commit
suicide. Somehow they all evened out. Papers didn't lie.
Jants began to grow whiskers in places few knew he still had
in him. The replies he gave were curt and to the point, and it
was when the pay packets began to pile up in the outbox at the
shopping center offices that several respected money-grubbers
began to worry about having so much liquid cash on hand. But the
guy with the broom couldn't be bothered. He was on to something.
Knew it. It was that 2nd week, when just out of sheer
desperation, like a sick kid who's lost his combination, gives it
1 last try. He did it. It was in the paper that very night.
The sausage was on top, the hamburger box next to it; somehow it
all seemed right and fitting, all the meats being there next to
each other. The front page was bloodless. They had to fill up the
print with meaningless weather reports and political dogma. The
killings weren't there. He knew. Jants pumped up to the sandwich
counter with a smile trying to come out. He still had a dollar.
"'Nother b.l.t.," he told the old crow. He deserved it.
Ben Ohmart
_______________________________________________________________
about the authors...
Allegra Sloman
argella@smegheads.montreal.qc.ca
David Dowker
david.dowker@canrem.com
Richard Cumyn
aa038@cfn.cs.dal.ca
Richard Cumyn is the author of _The Limit of Delta Y Over Delta
X_, a collection of short stories published in 1994 by Goose Lane
Editions. His fiction appears most recently in _The New
Quarterly_ and _The Journey Prize Anthology VI_ and is upcoming
in _Prairie Fire_ and _Stag Line_ (Coteau Books).
Ben Ohmart
FindLine@aol.com
A New York based poet, playwright and composer, has written for
the stage, television and film. Most recent stage works include
Ooglesnort Part II, a Pythonesque revue; Caliban, an absurdist
reinterpretation of Shakespeare's The Tempest; Daughters of Rage,
a ballet based on Garcia Lorca's play, The House of Bernarda Alba
and commissioned by the Dance Department at Florida State
University; Henry, an opera about William Rufus, William the
Conqueror's son; Two Panic Plays, a translation and adaptation of
two plays by Fernando Arrabal, performed at Syracuse Stage After
Hours; and The Friendship Play, commissioned by the Groves
International Committee on Friendship and the Family. The
Tell-Tale Heart, an opera based on the Edgar Alan Poe short
story, was commissioned by WFSU television and scores for
Stonewall: Old Blue Light and Jesse: The Jesse James Musical were
commissioned by Theatre West Virginia and the University of
Mississippi, respectively. A finalist in America's Best Comedy
Script competition, Ben is a professional "gag" writer with
several published and performed routines to his credit, as well
as many poems and stories published in journals across the
country. His translations in collaboration with John Franceschina
of the plays of the Marquis de Sade are published by Hollowbrook,
and his musical adaptation of The Jungle Book was recently toured
by Syracuse Stage.
Joanne Soper
jsoperco@morgan.ucs.mun.ca
"Age 28, undergrad at Memorial University of Newfoundland. I've
been writing since I was first published at age 8 in a local
paper. I plan to pursue a career as a psychologist, but writing
will always be important to me. I grew up in Hant's Harbour,
Newfoundland, and this has been an important impact on my
writing: I'm very aware of the importance of the ocean and marine
ecology, and I think my writing has been influenced by this."
_________________________________________________________________
