There was crack here. Not the good wet kind. The hard, fiery terrible sort that leaves you shorn.

She was eighteen. She was enjoying the Fourth with her family, her mother and half-sisters and –brothers. She ran outside her house, screaming, and the 9mm bullet hit the back of her head and traveled through, a pop she never heard, a flare she never saw.

She thought her mother was being murdered.

She was.

She wanted to go into nursing. Women she might have worked with in a few years held her as she died in the ER. She was wearing a white top and blue shorts, and the red was from her —

The red, it was from her.

They got him, as they often do, but they got him in a weird way, wandering dazed around the country club. He didn’t have membership but he was white. He almost wandered away because he was white.

Almost got away.

He pled not guilty. He had five witnesses placing him on the scene, and footprints, and his victims’ blood on his clothing. And he pled not guilty. The cheek, the arrogance. But it’s a small town, and he came from money.

His bail was set at seven figures, an unknown sum until then, and he sat and cooled and waited, and the money spoke.

Anger management, the court was told, had been taking its effect. He had been doing well. A change to a new prescription, that was all, a minor shift in his delicately balanced psychochemicals.

He was found not, by reason of.

He was three times the age of the girl he had killed. Three times the chances he had so casually negated.

—

It was the weekend, a celebration. She would have been nineteen. The summer she had been denied unrolled in heat and swimming and kids playing in the pool.

I remembered being nineteen. I cut off the top of my car and drove it around. People asked what I did when it rained, but it never rained. There was a girl, black-haired and coffee-eyed, who went with me in the car one day. As we drove her long hair flew about us in random dashes of silk. I wiped it from my mouth and eyes at each intersection. The sun shone on us, and we laughed and smiled, and I loved her.

She was seventeen.

It’s a small town. We’re relaxed here, we are casual in our open acceptance of Second Amendment rights. We are quintessentially, proudly American.

He was laughing with some of the Good Old Boys, the men in their eighties who had bought and sold the town many times over, their sons in their sixties, their grandsons. They all knew each other. They belonged together.

It’s not a 1911. It’s a subcompact Bersa, Argentine, and its recoil leaves a pinch on the web over my thumb. There is a reason Bersa named its model line Thunder, and stopped at .45. It scares my girlfriend because it is so powerful when it fires.

I went up to the grill and stood my place in line, and when he turned to me I put the fat little barrel under his jaw, and I saw his eyes.

It’s well made, its action smooth save for the odd feel of a double-rack as it ejects the spent shell and strips another into its chamber. My ears rang. It’s a loud little bastard.

I got my burger and sat down to eat.

–

Crack isn’t here any more, and eighteen year old girls walk the streets knowing they are safe.

Like I told you, it’s a small town, and everyone knows everyone’s business.

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Now that we’re clear.

Batteries not included, some assembly required, results not typical, bitches, so don’t think that swallowing a pill a day and sitting on your fat ass will make you look like a somethingteen girl. In order to get really hot, the only known solution is to get men really, really drunk, because BEER GOGGLES ACTUALLY WORK.

That’s right, fuck him while he’s drunk, fuck him till you’re preggers, and THAT MAN WILL BE YOURS! The SOUTH SHALL RISE AG — UM, SHALL CONTINUE TO RISE UNTIL — UM, SHALL CONSIDER THE POSSIBILITY OF — AH FUCK, THE SOUTH IS GOING TO SPEND MOST OF ITS WEEKEND LOOKING AT CHEERLEADER PORN AND MASTURBATING SADLY ON THE TOILET BOWL. BUT THE SOUTH SHALL DO IT AGAIN, IF IT DOESN’T HAVE A BAD CASE OF WHISKEYDICK!

Rated M for mature content.

(Oh, did I not mention that?)

Or C because someone somewhere in the mix says “cunt”, which is something our teen boys must never know about, nor our girls, and exesexespexialliay since it was Ani DiFranco who said it, well. C is for cunt which means Lesbian, boys and girls. Fear the cunt. Hate the cunt. Fuck the cunt.

[William Shatner says, “In every revolution there is one … uh, man with a vision” as InSOC tunes its keyboards.]

Or maybe it means Cookie Monster, that monomaniacal freak, but you know what “cookie” means, and aren’t we getting just a little bit tired of having mostly every word being turned into slang for pussy? I mean really, you can say something like “radio receiver” and have some puerile ass turn it into a sexually charged thing, and really, who needs all these neo-Freudians who just haven’t figured out yet that sometimes a cigar is IN FACT JUST A FUCKING CIGAR? You put the jack into the receiver and listen, like this, see, mm, isn’t that nice?

YOU! In the back row. Yes, you, radio boy. STOP JACKING IN!

W E      C A N      A L L      S E E      Y O U !

When you do it on camera it’s porn and you get paid for it. But when you do it in your own living room and “forget” to close the blinds, well, hell.

Turds float, but politicians stink, and long before it was a nuclear sub, the Nautilus was the invention of a nineteenth century writer who was also wrong about Martians invading Earth, and for that reason I don’t believe in steak tartare, which is clearly a Communist plot. In America, WE COOK OUR FUCKING BEEF, IVAN! AND THEN WE THROW PIG BELLIES OVER IT AND COVER IT WITH RANDOM SPICES, MONOSODIUM GLUTAMATE, CORN SYRUP AND WAY TOO MUCH GODDAMNED SALT! YEAH! THAT’S AN AMERICAN BURGER, YOU SOVIET SHITBALLS!

A penis is the same as a ski lift: Meaningless costly elevation for a few minutes of thrill, usually in special latex-filled costumes.

Our president is a genius. Note that I have not defined the words “our”, “president” or “genius”, and as we all know the definition of “is” is still in question. “a” is on its own. Sorry.

Hastur may be unspeakable, but XKCD redeems sins.

Eris died for your shit, and she wants it all back now, especially the pearl earrings, since she has a dance to go to this weekend. For now, her eunuch is just wondering if any random crap will turn itself into a fifty-reply post.

If I were a woman, I would be a lesbian. So I’m writing a book: “How can I get a sex change, will it get me more pussy, and does it mean I have to start driving like a stupid bitch?” Buy your copy of this sensitive, insightful tale of one woman’s courage to be herself tomorrow!

Radio is the opiate of the religious. Sundays are like sundaes, full of sweetness but lacking anything of real value unless you sacrificed the goat to Great Cthulhu.

FACT: If Hitler hadn’t reversed the swastika, we’d all be speaking German. It’s true! Try it yourself!

I took an antibiotic course in college, but flunked it.

Penises are overrated, except for the last 160,000 years of human evolution that somehow seemed to involve them.

If you can read this, you’re too far gone. Turn up at the next yellow light, then turnip at the following green. You’ll find me at the Radishon.

I have no regrets; I apologize for nothing.

Well, except, you know, 2002 till now. That thing, well, yeah.

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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.

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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.

To begin we’ll remember what we discovered about our orbit around the sun. You might recall the fear that followed the announcement, half a century ago, that our orbit was degrading and our world was doomed to fall inward, spiraling toward our sun until life here was impossible. I don’t need to recount the hysteria, rioting and religious terror that gripped every continent, nor how many predicted — with reason — that we would succeed in destroying ourselves long before the surface of the planet was rendered uninhabitable.

Then, of course, The Project was proposed. Simply, this was a bold attempt to rectify our world’s orbit by using conventional physics in a most unconventional way.

Any massive body, as we know, possesses gravity, and two massive bodies in close proximity interact with one another gravitationally around a common center. The behavior of a moon is an example of such action. The way our deep space probes have used gravity to slingshot around larger planets and gain acceleration into extrasolar space is another example of this effect.

And in fact this slingshot effect was what The Project was all about.

It was a simple scheme. Find a body of sufficient mass to act as a counterweight to our own planet, bring it into close range with our own, and use the slingshot effect to correct our orbit. The only two questions were which planet and how to accomplish this feat.

Fortunately the latter question was answered through our induced wormhole ring technology. The Project was simply a production of this hyperspace wormhole apparatus on a full planetary scale. The former question…

Forgive me; this is still difficult. All our best observational data suggested that — but at that range, there was simply no way to be sure.

The receptor ring was launched just forty years ago, moving at relatavistic velocity, and it arrived precisely on target. We know it worked, because we’re here to have this meeting today. We also know it worked because everyone saw and felt the effects.

The ring activated precisely on cue, just as it encompassed its target in that remote system. The effect was instantaneous and no one here can forget the sight of another world suddenly and shockingly appearing in our sky, correcting our orbit, then hurtling past at a significant fraction of light’s speed, pulled here by the effect of the wormhole’s scheduled collapse. The quakes, floods and storms that came about as a result will still be raging periodically for another decade at least.

All I can offer now is the — the assurance that, had we known, we would have … but there were no suitable … nothing else presented itself as a solution.

All we can do now as that world, which saved our own, continues its track into the cold depths of interstellar space, is reflect on what we did to save ourselves, and hope that our attempts to commemorate its dead will be sufficient to save us from damnation.

The acceleration down the wormhole, though it stripped the planet of its atmosphere, water and life, did not succeed in removing everything, and our archaeologists have already begun to decode the few pieces of information we’ve been able to recover so far.

I do hope we will learn from this — not just our mistake, but also from what we’re learning of those who lived on that other world. We’re learning, and we’re remembering, and in our way we’re mourning.

We don’t know everything about them yet, but we do hope that one day, the souls of those who inhabited the world they called Earth will forgive us for our selfishness.

Thank you and may the gods turn their faces once more to us, one day.

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

====

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.

Monopolies exist in a climate antithetical to free trade and open capitalism; a key mark of a monopoly is that it asserts hostile control over other agencies and overtakes them in the name of increasing its own bottom line. Recent actions by the United States federal government toward other regimes have shown it is interested primarily in hostile takeovers of other groups, all to better its own fiscal interests — again, clearly behaving not in a representative fashion, but rather in a business-oriented one.

For this reason we find that the United States federal government is both a corporate, for-profit interest; and that it is behaving in a manner which clearly violates its own antitrust statutes.

We therefore order that the United States federal government be broken up into fifty-one segments, each with loci in extant state capitols plus the District of Columbia. This will allow citizens of the baby Feds to choose which version of government they prefer simply by moving to a different state, and will effectively permanently disband the crushing, overarching control the United States federal government has exerted upon individual liberties and freedoms, particularly in recent years.

Border treaties, currency exchanges and commerce will be worked out over time but will not be a matter for this Court, as it has dissolved itself in the process of dismantling the United States federal government.

So entered.

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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.”

Though he knows nothing of Australian culture save what he’s gleaned from Fosters ads and Crocodile Dundee movies, Jackson insists he’s on the right path. “It’s gotta be true,” he declares. “Thet Hogan feller, he done went’n gone away twenty year, n when he come back he lookt jus’like hisseff. Hadn’t changed a jot, not even the movies was diff’ernt.”

Jackson was referring to the third and much-delayed film in the Dundee franchise, Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles — in which Paul Hogan does in fact resemble his earlier self, and which could be seen as an almost miraculous resurrection of a two-decades-dead character. The Lazarine performance, however, doesn’t appear to have been successful outside of Australia — except, apparently, in Jackson’s tin house.

There are other inconsistencies in the Righteous Church of Fosterology, such as the lack of goanna flesh that Jackson insists is a rite of the sacrament, as well as the expected beverage. Fosters, he says, is too rich for his lifestyle.

In their place he substitutes geckos and Milwaukee’s Best.

For Jackson, everything changed some fourteen months ago when he ordered okra lasagna, an “Aye-talian” meal, by mistake at the local diner. The side was a piece of garlic bread that, Jackson says, resembled Australia.

“I lookied at ’er a real long time,” he said, “afore I seen it.” Unfortunately the original piece of bread is long gone, devoured by the legions of hounds or insects inhabiting Jackson’s trailer, but all is not lost. The diner’s owner happened to have a Polaroid camera and, as Jackson says, “Ah kep th’pitcher.”

Some claim to see a superficial resemblance while others insist the slice of bread is the very image of the island contintent itself, with the butter representing the range of the Aborigines, the parsely settlements by Caucasians, and the robust crumb the can-do nature of all the nation’s inhabitants.

Whatever others may see in the sacred slice of toast, Jackson is absolutely rock-solid convinced of his faith. “Mir’culs happen all th’time,” he asserts. “Even in a slice uh Aye-talian bread.”

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