Archive for the ‘David Kopaska-Merkel’ Category
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 —
Catch a Slug!
Thursday, April 8th, 2010
Note: passing reference to nudity.
Fillmore was stuck again, and the slug was due any minute. Stupid dog! Elle pulled on her boots and gloves and stepped off the curb, squelching into a good 10 cm of slime. Stepping carefully, she made her way out to where the beagle was completely plastered with mucus. Elle suppressed a shudder. How could this be better than diesel? (Whatever that was.) This was why she usually walked to school on the pedarch. She heard the slug’s horn sound two short blasts. It was a block away.
“Come on, dummy,” she said, reaching for Fillmore’s collar. How could he hang his head and squirm away at the same time? The collar slipped out of her hand. Fillmore turned over to expose his belly. He knew she was angry. “It’s ok,” she shouted, “just come on!” Elle grabbed the collar again and dragged him to his feet. A loud “WHOOT!” blasted from the air horn on top of the slug’s head. Fillmore gave a panicked lunge and Elle bellyflopped into the goop. The slug was braking, but sliding right for her, slime making a bow wave half a meter high at its front. She shut her eyes and mouth, curled into a ball. Imagine doing this for fun, like some gangbangers did.
She was airborne.
—
Somebody was washing her face. “Enough, already!” She put up her hands and pain shot through her left elbow. She screamed.
“Get that dog away from her,” someone said.
Elle opened her eyes. She was lying on her back, ringed by strangers, thoroughly slimed. Fillmore was howling somewhere nearby. Her arm was broken. “Leggo my dog,” she mumbled. A moment later Fill was nosing and licking her face. He bumped her left arm and her vision went out for a moment.
—
Or so it seemed, but when she opened her eyes again she was clean, in a hospital bed, and a cast covered most of her arm. Her mother stared at her from an armchair in front of the window. She took a deep breath.
Elle winced.
“What were you thinking, young lady?” Mother began. Ma probably meant well, but she didn’t stop. Finally, Elle couldn’t take any more.
“Ma! I wanted to get in the Rollers. It’s part of the initiation. You know, slime rolling? Now I just have to get the tats.” She pointed at her chest. “What do you think—a bug-eyed purple monster right here? It would match my thong beach suit.”
As a way to shut her mother up this was spectacularly unsuccessful.
end