Archive for October, 2009
Wait, what?
Thursday, October 8th, 2009
He was telling her all about it.
“So I was all like, what, you want me to show you the fire? You want to see the fire? ‘Cause I can bring the fire if I got to!”
“What? What do you mean, ‘fire’?”
“And he was all like ‘You ain’t got no fire,’ and I was like ‘Don’t make me show you the fire, ’cause I will fry your head with that shit,’ and he was like ‘Fire, my ass, you just better give me that money,’ so I had to burn him.”
“Burn him with what?”
“With my fire! You know, my fire.”
“From where?”
“From my mouth! Shit, didn’t you hear what I said? And he just started running back to his spaceship with his head on fire!”
“Back up, back up. What space ship?”
“You got to have heard that space ship when it landed on Eighty-Fourth street basketball court.”
“I didn’t hear no spaceship on no basketball court. What’s all this bullshit about breathing fire out of your mouth and space ships?”
“But you know what happened then? You would never guess. He had a unicorn! On the space ship! And it just charged me.”
“I don’t even know what you’re talking about anymore. What kinda junk you been smoking this time?”
“No, no lie! Unicorn! Spaceship! And I tried to breathe fire on it, and you know what? They fireproof. No lie, those unicorns, they fireproof.”
“Yeah, well, whatever.”
“Hey, don’t walk away while I’m talking! I ain’t even got to the good part yet! You know what that unicorn did to me?”
“I hope he killed your ass, because otherwise I’d have to be listening to you talk bullshit just about now.”
“He stabbed me! In the chest! With his damn horn!”
“Which is why you’re still alive like that?”
“No, then he like, injected me with a space drug that makes you their slave, you see what I’m saying? And now I’m like, their slave.”
“So why don’t you go do their laundry ‘stead of bothering me?”
“No no, ’cause you know what I got to do?”
“What?”
“You really want to know?”
“Just tell me what you got to do.”
Then he breathed fire on her, and she ran away in flames. Good thing she was secretly a robot, or that shit would have hurt.
A Monkey in the Hand
Wednesday, October 7th, 2009
In retrospect, dear reader, it was a mistake.
I should have known. Mere days after I finished the mech-monkey, I found it dissecting its real-life counterpart. Pinned it to the table with my set of German-engineered scalpels, and taken it apart. The dirigible from Stepney Marsh was running late, so when I arrived home with a sack of new books, the deed was almost done. I should have disassembled it then, but I thought I saw something in its eyes, something human. A desire to know, to learn, to understand why it was different to the soft, furry mirror that wailed and squealed and gave up life so quickly.
All I could hear was my father’s voice, heavy with disappointment but no real surprise: Oh, Phineas. You’re so careless. Look at the mess you’ve made.
So I tidied up the sticky, stinking corpse and threw it down the chute. I listened as it clanged along the shaft, whirled around the spiral bits, thudded into the sharp bends, then came the faint whomp as the flames gobbled it up.
I was careful to clean all the bevelled and engraved edges of the mech-monkey, and under his glass nails (which I realised were too sharp by half). I checked his insides to make sure the clockwork mechanisms were all working, not misfiring in a way that might cause a psychotic episode. Turning him around, I opened the little hatch in his lower back where, each morning, I scooped three small loads of coal to feed his tiny internal furnace. The emissions came out as small, popping farts and, if I forgot to open a window, my workshop filled up very quickly with a nasty charcoal smoke.
I kept it – it was useful for fetching and carrying, and it opened cans terribly well. Then one Tuesday I found it reading; it saw me and threw the book away, but it was too late by then. I knew.
It probably would have been okay if I hadn’t got the next idea. I had been thinking about making a Galatea, but then I read about some sailors who’d caught themselves a mermaid and tried to bring her back to Portsmouth. They kept her in a barrel of seawater on the deck, but it seems she jumped ship just out of harbour, waved goodbye and ducked under the dark, cold sea.
And I thought ‘What if?’