“Stop it, you’re killing me!” I laughed and continued to tickle her tender tendrils. She caught my wrist and slowly eased it away, trembling with mirth. Turned out her race has a genetic mechanism built in that synthesizes a deadly, fast-acting poison from the oxytocin released by laughter. She went on to say she wasn’t sure whether the process was natural or it was introduced into their DNA during the species’s dystopian epoch; in the end, they never bothered to remove it from their genetic code. She and I had a falling out not long after that and I never saw her again. I heard on the grapevine that she died out on some hole in Centauri. With her condition, I guess it’s not a bright idea to work at a comedy club.

Accepted submission titled ‘The Fish and the Mermaid‘ for the Winter 2009 issue of Mirror Dance. The theme that runs through the stories is that of moonbeam ethereal penetrating a dense forest, descending until the silvery light fades, robbed by the swamp gas green of melancholy.

When the blood ran off his hands the war was over, and he turned his eyes to the vast, burning wasteland that marked his wake. He sighed and wiped the dead from his face, the gristle and blood falling inconsequentially onto the crimson soaked earth.

It was time to go home.

He stared at the horizon, a statue slowly sending shadow spreading with the sun’s descent. Then he ran, pounding steadfast past corpses, leaping nimbly across the eviscerated, hurtling on the tips of his toes as an avalanche of putrefying meat and rusting paraphernalia of war filled his field of vision, sending nanotech bullets into the hordes of over-ambitious scavengers tearing at the decay, reeling himself up a sheer cliff face as highly militarised alien technology silvered through the effluvia below, loping through the healing country past the bursts of wildflower and dancing insects that push from the vibrant grass, falling in a dream that shakes him awake on a cold cave floor, brushing his fingers ecstatically on the rippling wheat rolling on to the horizon that flashes as the sun sinks from view.

The thatched cottage, luminous in constellation light, sent out waves of warm heat and scent. He sank to his knees, the long strobe of days heavy on his flesh and soul. His eyes filled with the light. His voice was hoarse as he yelled at the golden vision that seemed magically there, his leaden legs finally propelling him forward to embrace her in a whirling hug sparkling with tears and litanies of love.

“A-at least I made a difference…” The effort sends blood flecking the boy’s lips. His lungs are slowly filling with blood spilling into Sarge’s lap with every cough. No, you fucking didn’t, Sarge screams, you’re just another useless fucking casualty. But the boy doesn’t hear. His eyes have gone out like the night’s last embers.

Sarge gets to his feet, the sack of meat slumping face down into the dust. He walks to the Command tent, passing rows of moaning men with filthy needles hanging from their arms. Brushing aside the tent flap, he takes out his pistol and sends a bullet into the General’s skull. A captain and lieutenant have their guns instantly trained on him. The lieutenant moves his gun hand away and shoots the captain in the stomach, his electric blue eyes inexpressive. Sarge’s moss green gaze flickers to the lieutenant’s bruised cephalic vein. “I shoot up with a saline solution,” the lieutenant says, going outside to see if anyone has heard the shots. He returns shaking his head. “We better get out of here. They won’t be too happy once they find out.”

“There’s something I want to do first,” Sarge says. He sweeps the ringstained maps from a trunk and takes from it a chunk of plasticine. The lieutenant looks at him for a moment before nodding. They arrange to meet at the outskirts of camp in fifteen minutes, and Sarge leaves for the doctor’s to cancel his prescription.

It was a maze of barbed wire and trenches stretching to the east and to the west. It smelled like a latrine. Sentries were fast asleep at their posts, guns pointed at the ground. A dog has died days ago, its bone etched flank squirming with maggots. When Sarge arrives, he finds the lieutenant with some guns, two packs of rations, and what little fresh water he could find. They look at the world their grandfathers left for them. Sarge spat on the ground.

“Let’s go north. I hear elk hunting is good at this time of the year,” says Sarge, pressing the detonator. At the center of camp the dwindling supply of heroin goes up in a pillar of fire, and the traitorous pair can hear the keening moan of the vast junkie army left without a fix. “The fresh air’ll be good for us,” the lieutenant says, smiling for the first time in years.

Anna sank to her knees and brushed the dirt from a hidden plank. She put it aside and stared for a moment at the battered silver travelling case that nestled in the hand dug hole. She took it out, unslung the twine that had hung roughly around her neck for a long time, and fumbled at the small key attached. She inserted it in the lock, turned, and the case clicked audibly open.  Startled, Anna touched her dirty and tangled hair, then stroked it before letting her hands descend into the case’s open maw.

She withdrew a pair of jeans, turning it over slowly in the candlelight. She sniffed at it, brushed it against her cheek under tear bright eyes.  Kelvin Cleen jeans. She put it down after a final sniff and took a flimsy shirt from the case. Musa Commonwealth. She put it back. The shoes were Prana. A pair of underwear from Somebody’s Secret. Her mother’s faded October 2010 edition of Great Housekeeping. A packet of gum.  An unopened bottle of Cocko-cola, the caramel fluid inside gone flat. Some lipstick, dry with age. A cell phone, its display eternally dark, like the emptiness that yawned in her soul. Anna sobbed from the pit of her stomach, all the sorrow and pain leaking from her scrunched eyes, yet affording no relief. She carefully returned each artefact to the silver case, and as she replaced the plank and its coat of dirt, there was a knock at the door.

One. The door, corrugated plastic reinforced with duct tape and scraps of rags, shuddered visibly. Anna swept the hay back over the patch of ground concealing her treasure, and tore the sackcloth from her body, the circle of twine from her neck. Two. Naked, she sank to her knees and waited for the door to open on the third knock, trying not to cry.

ask open ended questions that do not elicit yes/no answers

consider your general level of wisdom and without fail find it sorely lacking

drink a lot of water when your mood gets low

bodily functions are normal, and don’t let anyone guilt you into social convention (so what if you like the smell of your own fart…)

scream if you have to, just not at somebody

get a fucking hobby, and don’t be ashamed about it

take your heart out for a walk; live a little, go above 100 bpm

be responsible for something living. if not a child, get a fish. or a dog

return your cable box and if you must have tv, go to the library for dvds

yes. read. anyone who said “don’t you get any ideas” probably never read

when your ears ring, sing along

it is impossible to be bored. if you are bored, it’s only your own fault

when you become angry, investigate yourself. despite the wrong done to you, it’s never worth becoming mindless

no expectations = greatly reduced disappointments and increased delight in success

…in response to an authonomy.com sponsored challenge proposed by Lauren Beukes, the author of Moxyland. The object is to write a story that fits within the universe crafted by Miss Beukes, and she will select three winners to be published along with the novel. If you should wish to, scroll down at the book link and you can read my entry under the username zxvasdf.

kudos

Hearts in the night a shower of valentine sparks,

the soul romanced blistered with loving marks.

At the smoking gun a  puff of sweet breath blows

from lips circling with the colorsmells of a rose.

She flees a furtive fugitive on wings of sparrows.

For love bullets an envious Cupid trades in his arrows

I wish to be laid in a hollowed out tree, if decor requires it,  and lowered into a roughly dug pit, but would very much prefer to be buried with my skin to the dirt so the maggots can get to me and carve me apart in a thousand trajectories of life to build generations upon generations from the sheer sustenance of my benevolent flesh, spreading myself out into the world. A fruit tree, or a big bramble of tart berries is to be planted above, to benefit from my fertilisation of the earth, and subsequently, be enjoyed by my brood, my little gene carriers running about with sticky fingers unsticking from sticky smacking lips.

The funeral will begin after the wake, where I am displayed in the front of an ancient oak with its green spring shrouding my unembalmed self for the world to goggle upon, surrounded by raised saucers (so the dogs don’t get to them) of water filled with steeping caps of amanita muscaria sugared to attract the flies to their death. Incense billows from steel cauldrons hung from the oak branches. My arms are crossed on my chest, my death blue lips pushed in rigormortis to a grin, and the coins on my eyes are scratched and pitted doubloons still carrying the blood of pirates.

The word goes around, whispered to transients, whores, businessmen, college age kids, baseball players, artists, madmen, senators, trash men, fast food spatula jocks, aviators, actors, more madmen, suburbanites, suicide girls, drug dealers, gamblers, priests, janitors, witch doctors, and all kinds of people in a litany of language “…it’s a party. Yes, it’s a party. It’s time to party, it’s a party, yes, a party, it’s time to party, to party, yes, it’s time to party. It’s a party!”  Buses with a peculiar destination heading are gathered on streetcorners, and pile up with the oddest assortments of people, occasionally unintentionally hijacking somebodies headed for work. Small airports fill with private craft, sleek single propeller jobs, thopters, rockets, bicycle floats, hot air balloons, jetpacks, a thousand pelicans strapped to a lawnchair, its often bare parking lots filled with flashy cars, beaters, bicycles, footprints. A Zeppelin spurts into the sky, its crew of sky boys whooping as an empty keg falls to the ground bouncing higher than the members of the Sewing Circle of Greentown, who scatter, wizened mouths cursing like sailors above wobbling wattles. Lakes are arrowed with scratches of speedboats, wharfs find their yachts departing, and the oceans fill with primitive tribes hauling fish as their sails send them over the cresting waves. Aborigines clutch dolphins who slip like quicksilver to whales where they ride the blowhole to the coast. Hobos hear word on the wind and change their direction, squinting against the sun. It is a mass peregrination of eccentrics, madmen, the decadent, religionists, the people who can hear the whispers, that hushed tone that sends the pulse racing, the hair on the hackles rising, sparks running from toe to head, the people of a special breed, with an understanding of madness, of vibrant existence in the moment, of being real.

It begins gradually. Servants, as from thin air, transport several acres worth of tables which are draped with an assortment of cloth, set with all sorts of culinary tools (What does this do? the guests clamor later, Oh! What is that for?!); flowers cascade from the sky thrown from a Lockheed Hercules by a demented florist to be caught and set at each table by bustling butlers; polynesians carrying canoes full of torches with which they puncture the ground and send light blazing from each chemically distinct torch until the grounds resemble a wavery rainbow.

Usquebaugh, Caribbean rum, Russian vodka, French wine, sake, the Green Fairy, bourbon, bubbly, good ol’ pissamerican beer fill the massive row of bartops that seem to have sprouted from the very earth like an extremely alcoholic mushroom. The bartenders run about with springs on their feet, already serving the firstcomers who nervously inch up to the stools and order their drinks, delightedly discovering that no drink is too obscure, too tawdry. The woodstock crowd is one of the last to arrive, in a bus, driven by the ghost of Ken Kesey, its windows spewing smoke and unwashed bodies; on its yellow, flaking hull a badly sunburnt Irish yogi is sitting padmasana, blissed.

The guests congeal, scatter, linger, become a study of probability. Noise abounds, from jukeboxes, boomboxes, portable mp3 players, live bands with saxophones and drums and guitars or a lone soul sitting in a tree with an erhu. Drinks are pushed from hand to hand, lips are pressed from kiss to kiss, whispers licked into ears, gestures flung into the stars. It is a party. Oh, is it a party!

Just after dusk fashionably late international celebrities shuttled in by diamond encrusted helicopter (pursued by sky pirates who elected to join the revelries instead of engaging in the usual routine of pillage and rapine) emerge into the spectacle wearing their finest fineries exclaim, “Whose birthday is it?! Oh, look at how pretty that is! What a party!” A panda costume detaches itself from a yiffing soiree to pursue scantily clad women who leap into the warm pool, giggling, the panda falling in after, followed by a jackrabbit, Big Bird, two giraffes (both upset that the other had brought the exactly same costume), and a goldfish. Fire jugglers set a small tent afire and firemen with “I was there on September 11″ pins coordinate smartly to extinguish the fire, to the utmost fright of a pair of acidheads who find their tented ceiling flamed open to the sky to promptly run up a tree, yowling like alley cats in heat. The firemen spend the next hour trying to get them down and finally resort to pointing their magnum hose, pumping brack from the lake, cranked to full blast at the pair, who finally falls onto a cat. The sea monster visiting from the Pacific by way of a vast underwater tunnel surfaces, tugging at the hose now looking very much like a single strand of spaghetti in that monstrous beak. The frantic firemen wage a losing battle. Finding the climate distasteful, the sea monster surges back to its cool ocean home, leaving behind a well of ink. A drunk bigot nazi Ku Klux Klanner falls into the lake and finds himself permanently black for the next year, and completely ostracized by his peers. The wealthy unwittingly converse highbrow with the poor, whose mud-streaked visage they misunderstand as an eccentric affectation. The bartenders tirelessly twirl and toss their drinks, burst the champagne into thimblecups, and fill their pockets to overflowing with tip dollars in a hundred currencies. Secret agents meet in the throng to profess their love for country, anguished by their love for each other, and leave with the other’s cereal box decoder. Retirees of the Vietnam war find themselves face to face with the retirees of the Cong, engage with toothless arguments, begun half-heartedly, and conclude with a rousing rendition of America, Fuck Yeah, arms slung around each other, sopping cheap whiskey down their collars. A knife ejected from the grip of an exhausted butcher finds itself dividing a man of Kentucky from his arm. Not to worry, not to worry, the redneck cries, throwing aside his beer and fishing deep in a back pocket to eureko! withdraw a dense roll of duct tape. A snake charmer has his basket knocked over by a Merry Prankster and begins to play his pipes so furiously that the snakes creep from the forest until the man is frantically weaving his way through the crowd, a veritable pied piper anguis. The Irish yogi floats above all the chaos, his third eye centered, and through stems of bamboo primitive children blow spitballs that tack against his freckles. A kite drags a joyously yipping chihuahua by the harness deep into the sky, pulled along by laughing boys who crash through little princess tea parties to the great indignation of the pink frocked lisping girls who quite personally take into their hands the cause of rescuing the poor dog from a obvious case of animal cruelty. As the girls beat the boys down and haul the kite back to earth, the chihuahua whimpers mournfully. It had sniffed a bitch smelled good on the wind. A carnival bursting with clowns (on methamphetamines) establishes itself with madcap speed, its instantly erected tent almost immediately sending out stomach-wrenching smells of nostalgia, of popcorn and funnel cakes and manure. The clowns spread through the crowd, amusing amid pickpocketings, and fit thirty in a Mini-Cooper to roar away, crashing into the side of the tent, thus freeing the elephants who then crash the bar, overtaxing the diligent bartenders. A coven of witches throw hexes at random, and spirit away on broomsticks. A pair of philosophizers formulate an exact theory of the world, and in tandem with another pair of physicists, finally compose, through elegant mathematics and intense metaphysics, a verifiable Grand Unification Theory! As they puff at their pipes ecstatically, they shortly (gigglingly) find their tobacco stashes have been switched with potent CIA developed marijuana; before the evening is over, they have used the scribblings of elegant mathematics and intense metaphysics as rolling paper! Couples fuck on lawn chairs as brisk butlers whisk past, grabbing drinks that glob from gasping women’s straining grips. Some rut on the ground, green stains on coat and knee of pant their badges of faux guilt. A clown rushes by ballyhooing, his rump clung to by a dozen snakes. The snake charmer wipes his brow with relief and slumps accidentally onto a thrashing couple occupying a chair he believed empty. He leaps up but is pulled into the fray by manicured hands. A band called The Titanic Quartet play strings and instruments on a mechanical stage heaving to and fro to mimick the motion of a furious sea, sliding back and forth from either side of the stage. They are soon upstaged by a pair of muscle cars crashing through a billboard (My God, I didn’t see that billboard! What was it advertising? whispers a scandalized aristocrat) advertising a male enhancement pill that also raised one’s IQ and cured depression. The cars furrow in the grass, throwing the bands from the hoods drumming, howling, gesturing, onto the stage to knock the quartet into the lake with a splash (they go on to become the first famous modern day blackface troupe). The bands battle and the crowd rocks, throwing behinds and breasts every which way, greasy suave men with goatees and hands curled around wasp waists whirling, the children clapping their hands at the punk goth singer slipping on sweat smacked onto his ass still screaming into the microphone.

One by one, while all the clamour rings out in a flurry of colour and sound, they approach my outstretched body and wonder, marvelling at his pinkish flesh. A scholar whispers to another, “Don’t you suppose he’ll come roundabout alive, like the Finnegans?!” Some simply cry without knowing why, taking a snotrag from nose to expel a sob and bringing it back. Most just laugh radiantly and return to the saturnalia. They lay flowers at this unknown person, the host of this strange beautiful party. The dogs and cats bring the caught corpses of woodland creatures who also flock at the edges of the forest, their black eyes glittering with some unfathomable sentiment. The distasteful surrounds him also: vomit and excrement halos his coffin and bits of it are on his shirt, a bird loosed its bowels onto his cheek (to which watching from death he giggles to death), and the worms that crowd from the loam are crushed to death, letting up an earthy smell.

As the party slowly winds down, dawn spreading its fiery gaze upon this side of the world, the deathsleeping host is pulled away silently by four men who walk carefully over the sleeping bodies and corpses of guests to the grave, silhouetted against the east. Surrounded is his family in various poses of grief. As they make to lower his corpse, he lifts his head, winks, and descends. The four men drop the rope inside and pick up the shovels. As dirt is shoveled onto his rictus grin, an alchemy occurs, a transmogrification of soul… his children, released from the paternal yoke, that constant eye, are free to come into their own, to blaze a path into the future without doubt of judgement or a standard to stand by. The final shovel of dirt is shovelled, and the grave patted over and the fruit seed is inserted in its heart. His children resolutely tear away the tears that crawl down their cheeks with a determine hand and stand tall, chests puffing. The future is a translucent chrysanthemum of possibility, the eight arrows of chaos revolving, ripping round and round like this little chunk of rock revolving around that good ol’  hydrogen candle in the void, itself a whirligig in a spiral of light a mere arm in an incandescent  spinning top hurtling in a horde of discs falling to infinity ad finem.

The arm handling the steering wheel of the Phantom VI streaking through the desert is covered with tattoos, serpentine and starred with blooms of color. The other arm, which terminates with a Ruger clenched in a tanned hand, is bare and catches the shafts of light thrown by the sunset. A cigarette dangles from a lip, blue smoke streaming past the war paint. A feather flickers from a single dread, tickling a cheek. The old, dusty engine roars as she twists the wheel around, bringing it on a hard curve, scattering the horsemen in mad pursuit. She fires the Ruger through the passenger window and a rider falls under his horse.

She floors the accelerator, the engine howling.

It sputters, shudders. To a stop in a nimbus of dust which the horsemen circle warily.

Fuck! Her emerald eyes flickers to the gas gauge. She takes a last drag from her cigarette and flings it away, pushing the door open. She fires the Ruger at the rider hurtling at her, throwing him  backwards. As his horse gallops past, she grabs the reins, swinging easily onto the saddle and rides like hell, her chestnut hair snapping in the wind.

Eventually the pursuers pull in their horses and turn back home, spitting curses.

She watches them go, then rolls herself a cigarette under the stars.

http://www.pulpartbook.com/