Archive for the ‘Series’ Category
Goodnight Nobody
Friday, June 11th, 2010
“Send you home?” said the Green Empress, eyes ablaze. “My dear girl, whyever would I want to do that?”
Anya knelt low in front of the Empress’ throne, pressed down by the shafts of the spears carried by Mister Shiftless and Mister Hopeless, whose loyalties had abruptly shifted back upon their subterranean inception into the fortress. Though they both had said, “Sorry,” she couldn’t really blame them for wanting to curry favor with their old employer.
“Because I am asking nicely,” Anya said, raising her eyes; with the weight on her shoulders, all she could see were the Empress’ knees. Anya’s father the cat miaowed softly behind her; she presumed he was also constrained in some way. She didn’t know where the rabbit and the Turtle had been taken. “Plus,” she said, “it’s the right thing to do.”
The Empress leaned forward. “Do I look like the type of person who tends to do the right thing?” She sighed and continued. “For your kind of request, there is always a price. What can you give me in return for such a great entreaty?”
“I have nothing more than what you see,” Anya said.
“Wrong, girl. You have very much more. I could take your soft palette; you didn’t have one until the surgery when you were six months old, so I’d just be returning you to your original state.”
Anya tongued the roof of her mouth and said nothing.
“Or, even better, I could take your name. Not even your entire name, just one letter, that would suffice.” The Green Empress’ index finger reached down and lightly touched Anya’s middle-forehead, the third eye, the Ajna chakra, Anya-Ajna, and for a brief blinding moment the world flashed indigo and silent, and she felt something removed from her, a strange sensation of losing something she’d never known she’d had.
The weights on her shoulders lifted, and the Green Empress said, “Rise, Ana, and go home.” In the Empress’ cupped right hand was a weak ball of bluish light that pulsed slowly; with her left, she performed a complicated series of gestures and a circular portal of hazy blackness opened in front of Ana. “Step through, and you shall be home.”
A high screeching yowl, and then a small cat, mottled and striped and blotched in patterns of grey, leapt from over Ana’s head and pounced on the Empress’ hand, biting and scratching, a blur of teeth and claws, then it snatched the pulsing bluishness in its teeth and bounded once again into Ana’s arms.
The Empress screamed, “Kill them both!” Without thinking, Ana sprung forward into the fuliginous darkness, falling into the black hole where sight, sound, and everything else were obliterated.
Previously:
01: Mini Buddha Jump Over the Wall
02: The World, Under
03: Androcles Again
04: Look Into My Eyes, You’re Under
05: Shiftless, Hopeless
06: Cricetinae’s Paroxysm
07: Wind and Harmony
08: Dragons at Dawn
Schooling Valdan Mechaieh
Thursday, June 10th, 2010
It was a balmy afternoon on the sands of Newport Beach when Valdan Mechaieh–playing hooky in the month of May, his seventeenth birthday–first sensed his ice soul.
He’d been in science class with Dr. Wall. That bloated blimp bastard had actually tried to make him study for and retake a test Valdan had failed. He’d mentioned something about the behavior patterns Valdan used today would be harder and harder to break in the future. That old fart pretended to care but didn’t know a damn thing about his life. He told the old man that he hated science because it was pointless and he would never use it in his life. Besides, he’d show that stupid jerk: He’d make a life for himself without him and his stupid science.
Valdan had involuntarily leaked a few tears and asked to go to the locker-room restroom, at which point he grabbed his gym bag, ducked out of school and puttered his moped out to Newport. The Pacific waves were a sedative. Wind rippled palm leaves overhead. A couple on the pier talked in low tones of white hills like garbage trucks. A bus screeched to a halt on West Balboa Boulevard. Bell chimes announced someone shuffling inside the 7-11. Sailboats scraped their hulls against the marina.
A trickle of sweat slid down the crease of his spine. He arched his back a little so his Black Flag T-shirt wouldn’t cling.
All sound ceased… but for a final wave clapping the shore. Not even the slightest of breezes stirred the palms. An icicle crept down where the sweat had trailed. Mechaieh shivered. He flicked icy half-pellets stuck to his forehead. The pellets sat on his towel like the half shells of albino ladybugs. Mechaieh had not puzzled out their essence until they melted…. Waves clapped the shore, the bus pulled away, and boats again scraped the marina.
Mechaieh lay on his towel, trying to recall what he’d been thinking when this all occurred, when he’d received this gift, this sensing of another soul. Valdan’s grandmother, a Jew of the more Heterodox variety, once explained there were thirteen souls for humans to discover. Was this the fourteenth?
Mechaieh sat up. Now he had something to use against Dr. Wall! He’d freeze time, go look up the answers and then fill out a test. That’d show him mastery.