Archive for the ‘Jonathan Wood’ Category
Kid Things
Friday, December 19th, 2008
Jonny’s a space pilot. He’s got an airship made from an old tire swing. Lucy-Jane’s his girl. She’s wearing tin foil over her dress. I’m an alien lurking on a distant moon, waiting to shoot Jonny down, to pick over his bones. I’m going to go easy on Lucy-Jane, though. Things are rough with her mom and dad shouting all the time right now.
Jonny steers his ship down onto my planet. I clamber over the moon rocks and the slide. His cockpit opens with a hiss and he swings up high into the air and leaps out. Lucy-Jane follows more daintily, her foil outfit glinting in the light of the twin suns.
As Jonny surveys the barren landscape and Lucy-Jane asks what he sees, I crawl close. My tentacles drip ooze. My fangs drip blood. And then I leap. But Jonny, space hero that he is, feels the motion in the air. He spins, his laser pistol already unholstered.
But I leap too wild, and he draws too fast, and his fist catches me in the jaw, and I spill to earth, biting my tongue, the taste of my blood hot and sudden in my mouth.
And then whoever I am is lost back on earth, and now I am the alien, and I’m on Jonny, space idiot, and I am spitting my blood at him as I hit him. And I’m crying, and I think he’s crying. He better be crying. I am an alien. I feed on his tears.
Lucy-Jane ends it. She pushes me off him. I sprawl on the grass. On the moon rock. We both lie there panting, sniffing.
“Why is it always fighting? Why is it always aliens and fighting?” She shouts it. And suddenly she is crying, suddenly there are tears. They stand out, bright as jewels on her tin foil outfit, shining in the light of the twin suns. “Why doesn’t anyone ever come in peace?”
And she turns and she runs, off across the moonscape and out of the park and away into the distance of outer space, out into the great unexplored stars that Jonny and I have no idea about, won’t even realize exist until the slow time travel of our lives has left the park and our spaceships far far behind.
What Might Have Been
Monday, December 8th, 2008
Being the Story of a Man Who, Only by the Narrowest of Margins, Avoided A Terrifying And Most Ghastly Death at the Hands of the Beyond Men Who Sleep in the Margins of Reality, Preying Upon the Unsuspecting, Unworthy, Illegitimate, and Forlorn, After Also Narrowly Avoiding the Many Pitfalls of the Nine-Jaded Path That Leads the Lost and Bitter Away From Their Dreams of Redemption and/or Revenge Towards An Untimely End at the Hands of the Aforementioned Beyond Men and Which Lurks, Disguised as Nothing More Than an Ordinary Path The Likes of Which You Yourself Have Likely Seen Many Times Before, Upon The Paths We Ourselves Most Often Tread But Which Selects Its Prey Based Primarily On The Color of Their Underwear (Green Being the Color that Most Appeals to its Predilections) Onto Which This Man was Almost Led by Chriandrix, Agent of the Beyond Men, Harlot of the Nineteen Space Oceans, Mistress to the Lord of the Pits, and All Round Femme Fatale, Whom After A Spat with Her Lover, The Lord, Was Taking A Sojourn Upon One of the Lesser Known Realities and Easing Her Aching Hangover (Brought On, No Doubt, by the Consumption of An Over-Abundance of Soul Devouring and Blood Bathing) Through the Imbibing of Red Bull, Itself One of the Weakest Potions of Hellacious Redemption, Yet Which Was Less Likely to be Being Bought By Someone Who Knew Either Chriandrix or The Lord of the Pits and Which was Available at the Bodega Around the Corner from the Apartment of the Man About Whom This Story Revolves Like an Orbiting Moon of Potential Doom, Verily a Dark Moon Whose Gravitational Pull He But Narrowly Avoids Due to the Fickle Forces of Fate Alone
Waking up, after a night of heavy drinking, Dave squinted at the clock and decided that, screw it, there was no way he was getting out of bed today.