Archive for September, 2010
Somewhat Damaged
Friday, September 10th, 2010
Nothing, then the slow accretion of atoms pulling together, describing form, mind, body, bones, muscles, sinew, organs, and connecting tissue, as the transition recalls Vahid’s original pattern, reassembles him in this strange place. His new skin tingles, intensely sensitive, nerves afire with renewal. He flexes various muscles, and notices that he only has two arms; a mistake by the transition team, or a deliberate act so that he more fully fits in with this altuniv? Regardless, he will have to get used to the handicap.
As his vision coalesces, he sees concrete flooring, wooden pallets, yellow construction equipment, and endless metal racks full of cardboard boxes, dimly lit from high above by standby lights. Nighttime, in a closed warehouse. He’s made it.
He moves quietly to the far end of the warehouse, to the assigned drop location. The canvas messenger bag contains the clothes, sandals, tablet, and mobile phone planted by Vahid’s handler, as well as bottled water, a pair of energy bars, and three hundred local dollars in various multicolored notes.
Ravenous from the transition, he tears the foil from the energy bars, gobbles down the food, gulps water to wash it down. The clothing is snug, but fits well enough. He thumbs on the tablet and gets the safehouse address and a digital map with directions from the warehouse to the safehouse, only a few blocks away.
Vahid stows the tablet back in the shoulder bag, finds the exit (unlocked), and emerges into a sultry tropical evening, the air full of Southeast Asian food odors: curries and ginger and exotic fruit. He proceeds only as far as the end of the dusty lane before being spotted by a thuggish youth on a motobike chatting up a made-up young woman the same age. Upon seeing Vahid, he raises two arms, two arms on one side, and shouts, “Freeeeeak!”
And the others appear from nowhere, from around corners, from shop doorways, from the shadows themselves, each and every person four-armed, like Vahid himself before the transition, and he doesn’t see the first rock as it strikes above his right eye, nor the others as they connect with his knees, his left ear, his stomach, his kidneys, his two useless arms. In this place where he should blend in completely, he is surrounded, so fast, how do they move so fast, and before the first lead pipe or bat or length of board beats down, Vahid only has time to curse the transition team and his own willingness to make the worlds a better place.
This piece is just one in a 23-part linked narrative called Fragile, which will take a liberal interpretation of the song titles (but not the lyrics) of the masterful Nine Inch Nails double-album The Fragile. To read the other chapters in this series, click on the category “Fragile” below.
Selkie
Thursday, September 9th, 2010
Another new cabalist joins us today, Jen Larsen, whose work has appeared in Strange Horizons, Flytrap, and Nimrod International Journal, among other places. Fittingly enough, her first story at the cabal begins with a beginning…
When I was born, my mother tore me open from neck to gut and peeled my skin away. My slick and bloody pelt hung from her fingers, and I was left pink and screaming raw. I was born a seal, and she stripped that from me. My father, in the next room, waited and paced. Terrified. Full of resolve. Or stupid hope.
Survival is a pure and animal instinct.
#
My father had loved God until he saw my mother. On the deck of Staten Island Ferry, he gripped the rails and focused on the pale skin of his knuckles, the iron smell of the sea. My mother’s face broke like a closed fist through the surface of the water. When she opened her eyes he thought, blacker than the waves. She rested a small white hand on the hull and looked at him with a smile that stripped him bare. She knew all the terrible things he had ever thought, and ever would. His heart broke because she wasn’t real. His heart broke because she was more real than anything he had believed in.
#
My mother smoothed my pelt down over her knees, and settled me in her arms. Salt water and blood dripped through the bedclothes, and the iron smell of the sea. She called to my father, her voice like the riptide, and he was helpless.
I looked like him. Shock of ginger hair and a knob of a nose. I made tiny fists like he did when he stood in front of his congregation, spread out as far as the horizon, dipping back over the curve of the earth, their faces as remote as the bottom of the ocean. I was quiet in my mother’s arms, so pink and so new. A lighthouse flare of desperate hope. He still believed in Original Sin. He still believed.
My mother said, “Come closer.” She smiled at him with sharp white teeth.
He took a step, and another. He came close enough to touch me. He put out a delicate finger to brush along the arch of my eyebrow. And when I opened my eyes he saw that they were as black as the space around the navigable stars, and he was lost.