Archive for the ‘Kat Beyer’ Category
Chain Letter
Monday, February 1st, 2010
Aurora started off an ordinary kid, made out of complex strands of DNA and often bored in class. She passed chain letters during fifth-grade math. In fact she hated math up until seventh grade, when she worked out that she needed it in all the science classes she loved so much. So, cautiously, and prepared to flee at the slightest sign of x, she began to make the matter of numbers and the numbers of matter her own.
This is probably why she graduated summa cum laude. In a quiet moment after the loud honors and before the family lunch, she stood looking back across the grassy quad she had crossed so many times on the way to class. While she tried to get the pebble in her shoe to tip ahead of her toes so she wouldn’t have to take the damn thing off and shake it, she noticed the grass rippling and flattening.
“Perfect timing,” said an Englishman beside her. She hadn’t noticed him coming up. She didn’t answer, instead watching the elegant keyhole pattern laying itself out on the lawn.
“Crop circles,” he said. “I think they just do it to get my attention, nowadays. It’s what I study, you see.”
He handed her his card: Gerard Manley, Crop Circle Institute, Cambridge.
She forgot all about the pebble and only remembered lunch just in time.
She thought about that first crop circle often while examining rearranged Triticum aestivum and artistically interrupted snowdrifts all over the world. The circles began to follow her as well. Not until she returned to a theory involving her old archenemy x, however, did she make a serious breakthrough. She made her peace with the elusive variable and it lead her to a mathematical analysis of the patterns, laying bare at last their wonderful language. For they did speak, in an alien poetry that she could finally read as easily as DNA:
May your oceans always be jewels
May your air always be sweet
May your species someday leap from planet to planet
like light leaps from eye to eye
If you can read this, forward it to two interplanetary species in three millennia for good luck!
…Which made her laugh, at the nature of living things, which were never content with the genetic chain letter they sent into the universe each and every moment; they needed to pass notes as well.
Small Secrets Kept By Goddesses
Monday, January 18th, 2010
“Your wolves have no names,” Cybele remarked.
“That’s true,” agreed Artemis. “They all know each other, you see; it’s not important to them.”
“So how do you call any of them when you want them?” asked Cybele.
“I never feel the need,” replied Artemis, coldly this time.
“Let’s race,” Cybele suggested.
“No, let’s not,” said Artemis. “You know how that sort of thing just gets to be a myth.”
“Oh, come on,” said Cybele.
“All right then,” Artemis sighed, and swung her quiver over her shoulder.
“Go!” cried Cybele.
They shot off like moonbeams, and the wolves (named and unnamed) followed them, down mountainsides cheering with wildflowers and rockslides, through the sudden quiet of pine forests, down to the roar of the sea.
Artemis stopped at the water, but Cybele kept running, and when she saw the other goddess standing on the shore, she called, “Don’t be an idiot! Are you a moon goddess or what?”
Artemis remembered how lightly the moon walks on the waves. She looked at Cybele’s slender dancing feet, and then down at her own, high arched and silver-ringed. (All goddesses have perfect feet.)
Artemis took a deep breath and stepped out across the water. In a moment she began to run, and in another she had caught up with laughing Cybele. They ran all day, and came back at sunset with a tuna to grill on the beach, together with crabs and oysters they pulled from the pools. The wolves, not caring for fish, got themselves rabbits in the rocks.
“I think I won the first half of the race, out onto the water,” said Cybele.
“But I beat you to the tuna,” said Artemis. “Thank you for teaching me to walk on water,” she added.
“No problem. Hope you don’t mind if it becomes a myth,” Cybele replied.
“I won’t tell if you won’t,” said Artemis.
“Agreed!” laughed Cybele. “Pass the aïoli, please.”