Archive for April, 2010
Ruined childhoods
Wednesday, April 14th, 2010
AUTHOR’S NOTE: It’s been a long bloody week. You have been warned.
There is no Santa.
Sleeping Beauty. The medieval inability to diagnose narcolepsy. You do the math.
Think about Cinderella. Think about Anna Nicole Smith. Think about how you just thought about the same story twice.
A woman shows up promising you can go to the ball if only you complete several bizarre tasks for her first. Fairy godmother or spam e-mailer?
Did Jack’s magic beans grow a magic beanstalk to a magic castle and magic gold, or did his mother sell him into slavery and lie about where she got the cash? Seriously?
A prince being able to take Snow White’s corpse out of its coffin and take it back to his castle for a “happy ending” simply highlights the fact that the only difference between madness and eccentricity is
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“Once upon a time..” was your mother pushing you out into the world with a scream and prayer. All the fairy tales got right is the big bad wolf. There is no fairy godmother, no prophecy, no destiny. All you have is yourself, and the people you can con, cajole or genuinely charm into accompanying you along the way. It’s up to you to live happily ever after.
Sweet dreams. Sleep tight.
Death is Not the Answer
Tuesday, April 13th, 2010
by David C. Kopaska-Merkel, Daniel Braum, and Luc Reid
This is an exquisite corpse. Each of us wrote 1/3 of the story.
Joe wanted to blink. His eyes were shriekingly dry. He tried to focus. Bundles of dried wass reeds, a wall of them. Hung on the wall: stone-tipped spear, leather sack, dried Tolin head. He was in a native hut, but somehow things seemed to be too low. If he was standing on something, he couldn’t feel it. Holy crap! He couldn’t feel anything below his neck! Was he paralyzed? His mind ran panicked circles in his head.
A Tolin stood in front of him. It was a short one. They stood eye to eye, but most of the aliens were at least 7 feet tall.
The creature spoke.
“Death is not the answer,” it said.
Joe’s mind filled with a mechanical buzz. Sensation began to return to his limbs. Cold and stiff.
“Contact with you and your kind was too important to just let you die,” the Tolin continued.
Joe looked down and realized why he was able to understand its speech. His body had been replaced with artificial mechanisms. Parts of his new body looked like wreckage from his ship mixed together with the rudimentary Tolin technology.
But they couldn’t be that primitive, could they? Not half as primitive as he and his superiors back on Earth had thought … Joe dug into his memory, trying to recall. One of the top-heavy Tolin trees had crushed his chest. Had they really brought him back to life? Or had they just done some kind of radical surgery to save him?
“We want to understand your species,” the Tolin said, his voice a low hum that Joe could feel in his bones. “We know more than you imagine, and your computer video records are very easy for us to view, but we don’t speak your language yet. We thought perhaps if we took apart your brain, we would find your language in the pieces, but it was not there.”
Joe began to remember a little more now, disturbingly more. Yes, the tree had fallen on him: but now he remembered a group of Tolin standing in the shadows behind the tree as it fell.
“No, death is not the answer,” the Tolin said, “but that’s all right. We’ll just try something else.”
— end —