The Indigestible

To the market, I say to you, only to the market.
There we will buy only the things we need, and then we will return home.
And, knowing your eyes, I know the lie in my remonstrance;
for I have never been able to resist you
in your puppy looks as you plead silently after sweets
and caress with quiet longing the blister-packed toys.

We are not rich but we have soap,
which you hate,
as all boys do.
It is a small luxury I can afford, an easy price
to see you gleam.
The one penalty for going to the market
you accept with little grace,
but some tolerance, showing me you have washed
and I remind you that Allah loves the cleanly.

Then I must be very beloved indeed, you say.
Such truth in your complaint.

Dressed simply, fragrant with soap, my wealth,
you wait beside me for the bus,
your eyes bright but tainted with the fear
reflecting from my own furtive watch of the neighborhood.
It is not as it was, and I can no longer say
with the surety I once held
that our lives are better now.

But someday, son, I know
this will cease; you will one day be happy again,
your life — simple now, even still, even amid this —
filled with the simple trials of school
and girls and, one day,
marriage and grandchildren for me to relentlessly spoil,
and you wonder a little at my smile as you see it,
and smile back, tentatively, your hand slipping into mine.

So little you know.
So few heartbeats you have had.

I say I love you.
Then, you insist, with the logic of the young,
you must buy me a —
No, I say. No treats this time.
You didn’t wash up properly after supper last night
and you are still being punished.

We both know this means nothing.

Grunting along the patched, roughhewn macadam
the bus growls up its gears, and there is a crack and shudder
a blistering flash of time
scintillating around us as life becomes shattered,
glass diamonds glinting cold,
rubies bright across my eyes.
Your hand, in mine, loosens.

And I cannot hold on to you.

I wanted to say, I wanted to say —
so fast, you were away so fast, your eyes frightened, and I wanted to say —

How many nights did I hold you thus as your heart beat so fast
and rock you as you wept, comforting you, easing your childish fears
of the distant cracks of doom,
whispering into the cup of your ear that we were safe
within the walls of our home?

It has, it has ceased.

I cannot hold on to you.

Bathed now, cleaned now, safe now from any more harm,
beloved,
I leave you to move once more, numb, into the world of light
and sweets and toys,
and if only I could, my son,
I would buy all of them for you
just to feel your hand stir once more in mine,
your puppy eyes aglow.

==

Inspired by; in reference to.

This is a short story I wrote, mostly to illustrate to a pupil I was tutoring how readily imagination could catch fire. The contest was to write a quick story in less than half an hour, so I did something brief and intense, a sketch. That’s what short stories are, and in many ways they are much harder to write than novels. You just don’t have the time or space necessary for intricate developments; you have just a thumbnail.

The technology is hypothetically feasible; quantum entanglement might allow us to create two rings in space which are entangled and slowly separate them, allowing a kind of wormhole to form between the rings, a sort of tunnel that can be more or less instantly traversed by a body passing into one ring, then emerging more or less intact on the other side. Of course the engineering is well beyond our current tech level; but this has been one means proposed by which we might make “tunnels” to other stars. We’d just have to wait a long, long while before the egress, propelled at sublight speed, emerged at our destination.

It’s classic quasi-dystopian cheese, something done in the voice of the 1960s era a la Asimov. Hope you like it.

The Project

Ladies and gentlemen of the committee, thank you for this opportunity to address you this afternoon on the matter of the events of the last year. I realize your time is valuable, so I’ll simply present a summary of the incident, followed by our current reconstruction of the aftermath.

It’s never easy to talk about death on the scale that we’re discussing here; the magnitude alone is so vast as to beggar the imagination, and when the scale is at last understood, the response is always stunned shock that goes well beyond horror.

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WASHINGTON — In a landmark ruling today, the Supreme Court found 9-0 that the United States federal government was in violation of antitrust laws and ordered it broken up immediately.

Writing for the majority, Antonin Scalia had this to say. His words are offered without further comment.

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The definition of a monopoly is well-established and has been noted by precedent in this and other courts. While it has been argued — eloquently — that the United States federal government is an elected body which has been chosen by the people, we find to the contrary in several important respects.

To begin, the institution of the Electoral College effectively bars individuals from directly choosing a chief executive. Furthermore, this executive is insulated from consequences of his or her own actions when further elected representatives of the people refuse to act on the interests of those whom they putatively represent. Thus we find that the claims of representative government by the United States federal body are spurious.

Furthermore, as has been argued persuasively, monied interests have become the dominant factor in United States federal decisions, most notably in the last half decade, but on an increasing level for more than fifty years. This puts the government’s actions outside pure claims of representation; in truth it seems that more than half the time the United States federal government is acting solely in the interests of agencies in possession of eight and more figures in money assets.

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TOAD SUCK, AR — Cloyd Jackson is just like any other Arkansan who’s felt the hand of God: He’s a man with a literal — and literalist — mission.

Founder and First Pope of the Righteous Church of Fosterology, Jackson appears to be a more or less unassuming man living a modest life just beyond his means in a twelve-foot Airstream singlewide that lost its new house smell sometime between the years 1947 and 2003, during which time something on the order of fifty various litters of hounds inhabited, defecated and urinated in the confined space with him. But behind his five teeth and freshly-deloused beard there twinkles an eye nearly as bright as a Federline dissertation.

Preaching what he calls the Gospel of Paul, Jackson’s theology is muddy but consistent. He claims the soul is like an Aboriginal boomerang, cast from the hand of the Almighty (or possibly by His representative on Earth, Paul Hogan), intended eventually to return to Heaven unless met with temptation — what Jackson calls “The kangaroo head of Satan”.

In weekly services he shakes a rainstick — why, no one can say for certain — and brandishes a hand-made PVC didgeridoo. During his meetings — which have had an all-time record attendance of one other than himself — he becomes strikingly articulate, perhaps even possessed. “I am the Bullroarer of Him Who sits on high and Looks Down on the World, lo, even as unto one who sitteth upon the Rock of Ayers, which is called Ayers Rock!” he warned recently. And, “Do not give in to the temptation to follow the Doctrines of the Bruces, for lo they are most sinful and will clasp ye down into damnation, yea, even as like unto the Saltie doth clasp his prey into himself.”

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