Archive for the ‘Luc Reid’ Category
My Girlfriend the Mentalist
Friday, April 16th, 2010
Note from the author: Although my girlfriend does read my mind sometimes, this story is not about either one of us. Occasional mind-reading is fun and exciting; it’s only constant mind-reading that’s a problem.
“That’s sweet that you like me better,” Leanne said, reading my thoughts as a jogger passed us, “but you’re right: she has a nicer ass.”
It was great that Leanne always told me what was on her mind, but I found it harder to like hearing what was on my mind. Which, unfortunately, she knew. It was also impossible to surprise her.
“But I don’t need surprises,” she said. We were walking in the postage stamp-sized park two blocks from our apartment on a Sunday morning. “Believe me, I get enough surprises just hearing what people think. The old guy at the Korner Mart yesterday: he wanted to smear–”
“Look: ducks!” I said. It was true, there were actually two ducks today in the bathtub-sized pond in the middle of the tiny park. Of course, I was just changing the subject.
“Sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t bring things like that up.”
As usual, she ignored what I said and responded to what I thought. It wasn’t even a matter of privacy: it was a matter of being able to conduct a relationship instead of having my instincts conduct it for me. For just a while, I wanted her out of my head. And she’d probably just overheard that thought, proving the importance of my point. God, I seriously needed to break up with her.
Leanne looked at me disgustedly. “Fine,” she said. “You … just … fine!”
She strode off in the direction we’d come. She was probably starting to cry already, and knowing that I knew that probably was making her cry even harder.
“Hey, get back here!” I shouted after her.
She turned, but shook her head furiously. Her tears glimmered on her cheeks. “I know what you think,” she said.
“Thinking isn’t the same as deciding,” I said, walking toward her. “If you’re going to hear everything I think, fine, but some of that stuff is crap.”
“It’s not crap!” she said. “You thought–”
I pictured crap, a big, gloppy pile of it. She snorted with laughter that she was trying not to have and made an I’m-really-amused-but-I’m-trying-to-be-angry face.
“Come on, Houdini,” I went up and took her hand. “You didn’t even look at the ducks.”
The ducks had flown away when we went back to the pond, but I remembered what they had looked like for us both, and that was almost as good.
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 —