After these messages

So what if I'm fired, I'm fucking right! I swore under my breath the whole miserable way home. I got into the flat, threw the keys at the wall, and dropped my bag and box on the floor. I kicked off my shoes and started shedding my clothes on the way to the bath.  My sopping sweater landed with a splat on the floor, the shirt made it to a chair, the undershirt flew away into the living room, and  the pants, stockings and underwear made a tidy pile by the bathroom door. I turned the water on as hot as it would go and gave myself up to the scalding sea.

...

A while later, I hit the button on the message machine and started up the perker. The first two messages were from my mother; I'd call her later. Shit, I may need to borrow rent. This just gets better and better. The third message started as I was pouring, and as soon as I recognized the voice, I forgot everything. Until I burned the shit out my hand with boiling coffee. "Fuck!" I yelped; I grabbed a wet dishcloth from the sink before going back to the machine to hear the message again.

"Hey M--, it's me. Been a while, but I need a favor. Meet me at the old bookstore. It's now a coffee shop called Aleppo, if you haven't been since...yeah. Just meet me there tomorrow evening at 9. I'll make it worth your time." Click. 


Shit. I thought I was done with that chapter of my life. Just when things can't get any worse, they get...weird. 



















For the IndieInk Writing Challenge this week, Nicole Purcell challenged me with "You are listening to your voicemails. When you hear the third message you freeze in your tracks at the sound of the voice on the line. Start from there." and I challenged Jester Queen with "You've been given a gift. You aren't supposed to question gifts...but maybe you should question this one. "

The Twelfth Marker

"If you're reading this, it's too late. The hero is dead. Her friends however, survived the calamity and are in hiding. You may feel that the movement has died with the death of the figurehead, but it is not so! We are alive, we remember, we carry on! Onward, we beseech you, onward!"


This was the twelfth such marker we'd found.

Making our way over the ruins of a highway, we stopped under an ancient overpass for a break during midday. It's too hot to go without shelter for most of the day now, and true night-vision is cherished. Our hearing has gotten sharper, and our feet more quiet--we wear soft moccasins, and go barefoot when they wear out, until we have enough skin for more. We've finally learned the value of silence, after years of depredations by over- and undersized beasts. But silence doesn't save us from the parasites, only their hosts.

The first marker was a few months and several hundred miles south of this place.












For the IndieInk Writing Challenge this week, melissa brodsky challenged me with "Begin your story with the line 'If you are reading this...'" and I challenged Grace O'Malley with "Crisis averted. "

Because the Alternative is So Much Worse

Melly met a man at the beach once, and decided that she rather liked him. His name was Jimmy. She put on her sparkly dress and went for what the man called "drinks." She drank him under the table, but took pity on him and made him forget all about it. Jimmy the man took her to dinner the next night and had her food brought to her. Imagine! Not having to find your own shellfish, or shell them! She had such a good time that she decided to go home with him, to see if there were more surprises in store. There were. She met his parents, though they called themselves Bill and Pam without any of the proper honorifics which was confusing, but Melly was smart. She called them by the names they gave her, though the impropriety and the sheer mischief of it made her toes curl with delight. Melly stayed with Jimmy for a few seasons and it was decided that they should get married; she was the most excited about the shiny rock that Jimmy gave her, which could break anything and was unbreakable itself. Melly wasn't really sure what married meant, except that she and Jimmy got to live in their own house and not in his parents' basement, and have all their own things, and a whole new set of friends. She had a few children with Jimmy, which was expected--(Melly had learned about these things at school, and her own mother had taught her tricks to avoid the birthing pains, which came in handy after all)--and they raised the children, more or less happily. Melly stayed home and played all day with the babies and made sure the home was in order, because that was sensible, while Jimmy went somewhere else all day and did gods knew what, save that he came home dirty and tired and wanted nothing more than to sit in front of the tube and have his dinner. By this time, Melly didn't mind making dinner, because the food was always readily available in one place and she didn't have to work hard to get it. Credit cards never did make any sense to her, but they made sense to other people, and that was fine. And funny.

Several years later, after the kids were grown up a bit and Jimmy had grown out a bit, Melly borrowed an idea. "Let's all go on vacation! We haven't been out of the town in ages, and Betty the neighbor says that's just what we need to kickstart this family again!" Jimmy reluctantly agreed after a little wheedling and a little heavy petting and the family set off in the minivan--Jimmy driving, since Melly never learned, and the four children, aged five to fifteen. Once they reached the sea, they pitched their tent at the campground and immediately set about their preassigned tasks. Jimmy was to get the food, Melly the firewood, and the kids were to stay out of the water and not be eaten by sharks. As Melly wandered along the shore, she began to remember things, like being thickly and properly furred, and the delight of a raw oyster sliding down the throat--She noticed the salt water had washed away the skin on her feet, and that she had shiny black nails, the same as her own mother's, she remembered. Melly dropped to her knees and began to scrub, scrub, scrub the way she scrubbed her children in the bath, turning them over and over to make them laugh, teaching them to close their noses and not let the air in, and giving them kisses with pretend-whiskers--whiskers she re-discovered as her ablutions reached her face. Soon, she was back to herself--the old, young Melly before she met the man Jimmy on the beach. From the water, Melly glanced once back to her children playing their videogames and her husband struggling with a bag of marshmallows, took a deep breath, and dove beneath the waves.

.....


"...And that's why we always come back to the sea."

"Because we get bored?"

"Yes. Now be a dear and go fetch us some shiny rocks to break these oysters with. You know the ones I mean."

Perspective

"All systems are running within normal parameters. The new modifications have been integrated without incident. System reboot will occur in four thousand two hundred sixty-six years."

The machines whirred and the electrons clashed like they were supposed to; the universes were created and destroyed according to the painstaking calculations of teams of hand-picked scientists. Everything was occurring as predicted, according to the laws which had been discovered some time ago, and which had yet to be proven false. Though, not for lack of trying.

...



Bright sky beneath the stars, your hopes reach to touch me; the idea is there but somehow still missing the mark. The ones who made you, bright sky, they still don't understand what I'm asking for.

I sure liked the colored windows, though. Those were beautiful.

couch potato

When I got the call, I was ecstatic. I'd been without a position entirely too long and my landlord had been breathing down my neck for the rent. It's only been 10 months...or 17. One can't pay much attention to such depressing trivialities. Still it would be nice to be a little less appreciated; the landlord was completely odious. I sniffed in the proper way and made my way quietly past the landlord's door and out into the street.

I wondered what sort of work I would really be doing as I walked into the elevator. I pressed an Art Nouveau 17 and stood back from the door. The elevator cage jerked into motion but I did not move, having long ago perfected the art of being still in moving vehicles. The job descriptions are posted, but are rarely the truth--there is a kind of code for these things, and if you haven't learned the code you haven't got anything anyone wants. You may as well go beg in the street. That's a different sort of code of course, but simpler. Harsher.

The hissing of the elevator interrupted my reverie and I got out, heading for the checkered door. I knocked and was let in by a perfectly made up hunchback in a cerulean coat and silver-buckled shoes. He indicated that I should wait in the pristine foyer until called and I stood there some minutes, further contemplating my uses, and deciding upon the best form of address for this particular employer. Several things came to mind, and were rejected, in their turn for one thing or another. The man's name was Tern, for crying out loud. It's ridiculous to address someone with an honorific longer than the surname. I'll simply have to take this as it comes, I sighed inwardly, and hope I don't mess it up. Again. The hunchback returned shortly and beckoned me through a yellow door into a formal meeting room, seeing that I was a comfortable as could be, he walked out and the snick of the lock was the last thing I heard.

Tern, whoever he was, had insisted on the plum-colored couches. Was he mad? I wondered, until I sat down on one. So comfortable! I suppose I would have gotten them, too; color be damned. At least the room's other colors suited the purple beasts--greens and creams and dark wood floors, very complimentary.

Then the couch growled at me.

Ah, I thought, and immediately stood back up.









 For the IndieInk Writing Challenge this week, Carrie challenged me with "He insisted on the plum colored couches. Was he mad?" and I challenged Kameko Murakami with "I figured out what I am, and it's not good...I'm all right with that. "