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| I am,
indeed,
the king of three ay em
with trustworthy hand
and three clicks of a pen
I bring forth light,
action,
story.
the leaves,
they applaud for me,
the winds,
they whisper songs of fealty
and when I strut
the prodigal moon, the generous stars,
spend their lumens to curtain my path
when morning comes
and I wake, exhausted
I read the scribbles
of my boastful pen
who has stolen my magnum opus!
who dare replace it with this
utter drivel?
I am,
indeed,
the king of three ay em
whose dominion extends out in the twilight lands
but just short of the land of six ay em
that bright, unholy place
of coffees,
early birds,
and sensible people.
Now if you'll excuse me,
I'm off to get some sleep
until tomorrow,
at half past three,
adee,
adieu
to thee,
to you. | | |
| The Devil's Candy
-----
The needle entered my skin. My fingers tensed at the prick, and I white-knuckled the chair as the liquid seared through my veins. Liquid fire rushed through my right arm, igniting every cell, every piece of DNA hidden in thousands of nuclei. I saw the damn doctor smile, a bluish white anomaly that contrasted his tanned face. He whipped the elastic band from my upper arm.
I screamed and lost consciousness.
-----
I woke up to a million whines from a million machines somewhere in my vicinity. When I drew breath, brilliant flashes of red ranged through my vision, hundreds of me started to grab at the oxygen nourishment. Cells. I am a multitude of cells awakening in a body once unified. The Devil's Candy, Pandora's Box was a manufactured disease that granted sentience to every cell in your body. It would be a quick, painful death, each cell death crushing the psyche until you were reduced to a bumbling fool, a million broken pieces on life support. And they would pull that too, the doctor with the whitened teeth didn't give a damn for a test subject like me.
Me.
The room came into vision then. It was like those pictures of flies, mirrored images bombarding me at once. But I tricked myself, like magic eye, looked at it all like I wasn't paying attention. Then I saw the whine of the flourescents above me. White tiles on the ceiling. I was on a dentist's chair. I tried to get up but I was strapped down. Though I wondered whether I could do it even without the straps. A door opened to my left.
The doctor. “Awake?”
I managed to groan. How to make a coherent sound from a team of one hundred cells with no individual voices?
He laughed. “You survived the first test. Most of you can't speak for at least another week. If you live that long. If.”
I had a strong urge to kill the man. But he was a giant and I was lilliput.
“But don't you worry, I have high hopes for you. This shot will help you, it gives your cells a little extra boost. You'll experience less cell deaths than us normal humans.” He chuckled at that, like it was some inside joke between him and the rest of humanity. I spat.
This time, I didn't watch the needle. Just felt for the invigorating fire enter through my veins. I was each of us, absorbing a piece or two of the stuff, letting it enter my nucleus, fiddle around with my insides. Soon I would produce the proper little pieces to shore up my cell wall.
The doctor shuffled around the room, grabbed a bag of clear liquid. An IV. As soon as he set it up, he was gone.
I slept again.
-----
A piece of me broke. My wall was letting in some kind of foreign particle. A knife slashing at my sides. Fix it! Fix it! I felt my precious insides spill out of my membrane. Proteins breaking. Other parts of me watched, indifferent. But this was death! Blackness invaded my vision. I felt myself scream without voice. Torture. Death.
And then it was gone and I was eating it. The pieces of my former self dissolved, nourishing the other parts of me. I was dead, and once again alive. It was dangerous to isolate, and yet I could no longer group myself up as one entity.
I felt the straps on my wrist. So I tried to shift my wrist selves a little bit. Harder. Thinner. Shed hairs. Produce sweat. Pull. The straps bit at my skin. Smoother. My palm caught at the strap. OK. Sharper, jagged edges. Cut through the strap. Back and forth, slowly, slowly.
My leg throbbed. Shit! I had concentrated too long on my arms, my leg cells were suffocating. Shift focus, realign, balance out the nutrients. Keep alive, damn it.
I tried again at my wrists, but slower this time. I kept some parts of awareness for the rest of me, letting the mundane continue. Produce energy. Respiration. I don't know how long it was, but the straps were cut. I lay there for some time, exhausted. I took in breath one cell at a time and took status. Each cell-self appeared intact, ready.
I moved my leg. Tried to coordinate each part of me. Stretch, pull. Push, breathe, tense, relax, beat, think, fire impulse, move. I stumbled, but I was up.
I looked about me. An empty room save the chair. One door to my left, a mirror on the far wall. I saw myself and shuddered. I was ugly! It was a smorgasbord, lacking the clean structure of cells, tissues, even organs. And yet, it was me, who once had a... name?
“Jenkins?” The doctor's startled voice.
I turned slowly. Commanding my cells. Is that my name?
“How did you?” He looked alternately towards the broken straps and my arms and legs.
“Iahhhhh,” I managed.
The doctor drew a needle and took a step towards me. I stumbled backwards, flailed my arms. “Noooooooooo.” I moaned.
“Oh, but this will help you sleep, you're still not ready for... movement.”
I detected malice. I shifted the route of my veins. I constructed a fake vein, reabsorbed cells, and vomited. I slumped into the chair.
“There there,” the doctor purred as he injected me.
I felt the fake vein take the liquid. I drew a wall around it, let a probe cell enter. Immediately I felt the poison of it attack me. That part of me was lost. I screamed. I closed my eyes, went limp. Faked unconsciousness. Ha! as if such a thing were now possible for me.
I felt a hand reach for my neck. I created sharpness. As his finger touched, it broke skin. I deposited myself in his finger. I opened my eyes and smiled.
The doctor drew back, his hand holding his finger. “What did you-?”
I saw myself dig through his membranes, enter his blood stream. Through the roar of liquid red, I could feel myself going.
“Kill.” I said.
“Wha-?”
I let myself lodge onto the wall of an artery. Commanded myself to divide, expand. Block the blood. Pressure, pressure, burst!
The doctor gagged. Fell to his knees.
“Hurt?” I smiled.
I was already going after one of the delicate parts. Already there were dozens of me attacking various parts of his body. Once I even tried to absorb and assimilate one of his cells. It tasted disgusting, and that cell had died.
“Jenkins, wait. I can stop this. I have an antidote.”
“Ga ga ga,” I laughed. Antidote for what? How can you make human what is no longer?
Parts of him were starting to fail now. He writhed on the ground, white foam appearing at the edges of his mouth. His eyes rolled back. I felt his cells shutting down, and then I knew those cells of mine were likewise doomed.
I braced myself for the multiple deaths. I thought I was ready for it, now that I had experienced cell death before. I wasn't. Multiple deaths are exponentially worse.
I felt myself falling forward.
| | |
| Two wingers hovered about a column of smoke several blocks away. I blinked it in, drew my hood. The filtering fabric settled about me, the faint mechanical whine bringing me enriched air. Atmohoods, expensive. But well worth the jobs I had to pull to get it, the alleys I had to comb to find the right merchant hoodlum, and the bribe I had to pay the government cleric to look the other way.
I jumped my front steps, barely noticing the small orange fruit littered about the broken concrete. I left it all behind with two strides, a leap... the spray painted signs, the corner, the smoke... hell, life itself passed me by the way I moved. On mornings like this, when death feels normal, up in your face, you need the run.
It was a cobalt blue trim on that house on Kenneth somewhere between 15th and 22nd. There was a porch, two wicker chairs, and a rosemary bush. Fucking trimmed. A neat hedge in this city?
"Young man?" An old man spoke. The one to whom this bush presumably belonged. The rubber tip of a metal cane drag-skipped, spraying paint chips toward me. His knees looked untrustworthy, like hired mercs willing to run at the first sign of trouble.
"I mean no harm." I spread my palms and peace bowed the customary 5 degrees. An extra one, maybe. I still respect my elders. "You trimmed it."
"Its a tough plant," he said. He rubbed his eyebrows.
And then he was just silent. Looking. Like he was waiting for me to strike. Except I couldn't --no openings.
"Came with the house. Wife's name was Rosemary, you know that?"
How the fuck should I-- "I'm sorry about your wife."
"Rosemary? She's just in the house." Old man turned. "Rosemary, bring the lemo-aide, it's Jo from fourteen-sixth infantry." He grabbed my wrist. "Don't just stand there, come in!"
The filtering door slapped the door frame after our backs. He had left the black metallic security door open. I didn't like it, but I scraped my boots against the hairy mat anyway. The foyer had some modest images shifting from children to pets to battle regalia, the standard fare. Hardwood floors too, a retro touch. Probably rich, too. I instinctively did the math for what I could buy for floors like that. I decided the air in here was probably better than my atmohood. Like I suspected, the air tasted stale, but oxygen-rich, almost devoid of pollutants. Rich indeed.
"I'm Horatio," old man popped out from the far door of the hexagonal entryway. "I got some tea brewing in the kitchen, over here."
The kitchen ceiling was an asymmetrical deal, with the freeze unit, stove, sink sitting at obtuse angles. The rest was storage and prep area. Orange with plated metal accents. Odd.
Horatio poured out two full mugs of steaming liquid onto a small table with cylindrical stools. "An herbal tea grown in the commune vats. Traces its root from cannibis. Harmless, though."
"Weed tea?" I quaffed the questionable stuff, and it was sweet and bitter at the same time. "Thanks."
"Now, young man, you read any Shakespeare?"
I shook my head.
"Pity. Now then, Hamlet, what brings you to me?"
"My name is-"
Horatio shook his head. "Irrelevant. The tension in your shoulders tell me you're a confused man. I might as well call you Hamlet."
I noticed my shoulders. Some fortune teller trick, maybe. I flexed them back, tried to cull them into cooperation.
Horatio sipped his tea and laughed. "No use. In any case, no need to hide from me."
Who the hell was this old man? Ever since we entered his house, he seemed more healthy, alert.
"You said you noticed my hedges. Good eyes. What about them brought you to me?"
"They were weird."
"Trimmed, you said."
"Well yes, but more than that. Like why care about plants? It's hell out there how you have time to do something so..."
"Useless."
"Sure."
"I trim them because they remind me of my dead wife. Because it's hell out there. It preserves my sanity."
"Fine. Sanity. That's what I'm confused about. This place reminded me of... things. When things still felt sane. Maybe back when I was a kid."
Horatio had dark brown eyes.
"Your wife, what was she like?"
"Beautiful. You know when I try to capture her face in my mind I can't do it. I always remember some stupid thing, like that grin she had when she would steal my shoes when we'd take the evening walk, and then I turn around and expect her to be there."
"How'd she?"
"Killed. By kids, I think. I didn't even see them. They burned down my place. Had to flee. This was back before everything went to hell. Turns out hell is wherever we live, we breathe."
I raised my mug and drank the rest of the weed.
"Brutus," I said, then, slowly.
His lips tightened, thin white lines spreading across his face. "Brutus, you say?"
"XCD-12, Carpe-Diem, whatever you want to call it... you deal it, don't you?"
"What gave it away?"
"Temporary dementia, rich air, hardwood floors, weed tea, trimmed hedges. My dad used to say, 'add up the abnormalities and you'll find a man.'"
"The drug of a thousand faces. Yes, I have this thing." He said, then laughed. It was like a crow's song now, breaking across the cool morning.
My right hand twitched. I stretched my neck and faked a yawn.
He swung first. It was an unexpected upward arc, a kind of kiri-age. I saw the glint of metal as I jumped back. The blade was hidden under his flowy sleeve. He was quick.
For an old dude.
I kept my wrists inward, elbows down, body sideways to create a small target. I'd rather not use everything I have at once, especially with the energy costs.
Horatio growled and slashed again. This time, I let myself sway a little, show a fake opening on my left side. He committed. Excellent. Forward, left fist to the ear, sidestep, another left, then a right. I felt the snap of knuckle against flesh. My body was all movement and fire. Horatio's breath stunk. And his fingers were so thin. Ghost thin. The poor bastard.
The knife bit my flesh and I flashed away. I felt the cut on my left forearm. Shallow, and I hoped the blade was clean. I didn't feel any poison. Horatio grinned. "Why, might I ask, are you so eager to die, young friend?"
"Cancer, Horatio. We're all cancer cells, multiplying too quickly, killing each other, killing ourselves. We don't ask questions like that."
I stepped in this time, telegraphed a right hook. Instead, I drew a subtle pattern with my left against my thigh. I leapt above the table, I heard Horatio gasp. I drew my own blade, a eighter I've had since I was four. I enhanced it, and drew two kesa-giris in the air. By the time I landed, Horatio was on the ground, choking on his own blood.
Why do old people always have such watery eyes?
I searched the house for his stash, took enough for a couple months, and left. When I stepped out, I pinched a Rosemary leaf between my fingers, smelled it. Like a sweet longing, the fragrance. I threw it on the asphalt next to an empty syringe and a crushed can.
I ran.
----- | | |
| In the ordinary, God resides.
God taught me this simple truth in college. One day, on the way to class, I put on my earphones and turned a round plastic knob. With a beep, my cd player began the first track of a David Crowder Band cd. While on the way, I watched dozens of people pass me. A simple thought crept into my mind.
I may pray.
Permission to pray. I felt it that way. I realized that a person may pray to God whenever he or she wants. We are given such a privilege. You must understand, this changed my life. I began to pray outside of set places, set times, set moods. When you pray in the ordinary, your eyes change. You see traces of holy-ness underneath smiles, breaths of wind, coincidental meetings with friends. They become holy moments. Moments of praise.
Today, a customer purchased a trash can. Not any trash can. A Simple Human sensor-activated, one-hundred-ninety-nine-dollar trash can. I have a nickname for this particular trash can. I call it "the magic."
About fifteen minutes before this moment, I noticed this man checking out our trash cans. So I approached him. "Satisfying, isn't it? The way the lid closes," I said. I stepped on a similar can. Then, I mimicked the lid with my palms and made a faint fssshhhh sound.
The man looked surprised. Then he laughed.
Continuing, I said, "But have you seen the magic?" I stuck my shoe in the sensor. The magic, noticing my presence, obeyed by opening its lid. I swept my arms around the trash can with a grin. "And to hold it open-" I pressed a button and the lid bent further, then paused.
"Yeah, I saw it. It's awesome. I'm thinking about getting it."
"You do that." I nodded, then walked back to the registers, where I was scheduled to be.
Fifteen minutes later, the man puts a large box on the counter in front of my coworker. The magic. He had a big smile.
I smiled. "Yeaaaaa! You decided to get it? The magic? Oh man," I exclaimed. I hopped beside my counter and walked over.
He turned to me, nodding.
We high fived.
After he left, my coworker came up to me. She whispers, "How lazy do you have to be to buy a sensor trash can?"
My inner self replies, "What?"
I like to think I am unshackled by dollars. But do we not judge a product, a job, a man... based on its price tag? Do we not pity a man who doesn't make the kind of money you do, or criticize a man who buys the kind of luxury you would never?
Guilty.
But today, when I, a retail employee gave a customer a high five in a joyful moment, I like to think that our humanness trumped our inhibition. I like to think we said a collective fuck you to the $199 price tag. I like to think we shared a holy moment.
I think a holy noun (a person, place, or thing) is a noun where one or more people recognize and consistently share in an experience where God is present. Living. True. That's not a very restrictive definition.
Yet... aren't these holy nouns rare? | | |
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