When I sit down to write these posts, I never know what they’ll be about beforehand. It’s a first-thought-that-hits-me-stream-of-consciousness sort of thing. Sometimes they’re on point, other times they meander a bit, but as stated in the About This Blog section, the posts are less about me attempting to appear clever or knowledgeable (what are the odds, really?), and more about getting myself into a proper writing frame of mind with a warm up exercise. Mental calisthenics, if you will.
As you might imagine, it doesn’t always go to plan. Case in point: the post below. Inspired in part by Susannah Breslin’s Forbes article, Why You Shouldn’t Be A Writer, and Martin Levin’s, You Suck And So Does Your Writing–which is more about petty squabbles between notable literary figures (how I would have combined the two ideas is anyone’s guess)–it was meant to be a discouragement piece, you know, separating the wheat from the chaff, and all that, that started out like this:
Of All the Things You Could Do With Your Life, Why On Earth Would You Purposely Choose To Be A Writer?
Don’t worry, it’s not a trick question, but one you should be prepared to ask yourself and answer before undertaking writing in any fashion as a serious profession. Among the more common reasons I’ve come across in my travels are:
1. No commuting and every day is Pajama Friday!
I can’t fault your logic here because commuting is generally a nightmare and what’s better than tooling around your house in a onesie all day long like an agoraphobic superhero? Sadly, it isn’t a good enough reason to want to be a writer, especially since there other telecommuting positions that offer more stability and better chances at becoming a career.
2. What better way is there to make a ton of dough and roll around in my piles of cash?
Well, you could try your hand at playing the lottery or betting the ponies, for starters. Rich writers are the exception to the rule. The majority of people who claim writing as a profession, work their mental fingers to the bone, producing material for years before they even get a glimpse at recognition, let alone a healthy paycheck. Instead of rolling in piles of cash, you’ll most likely be rolling up your coins, praying your landlord accepts pennies for rent.
3. Nothing better than being my own boss with flexible hours!
Flexible hours? Been writing long? Writing is a huge commitment that commandeers your entire life with absolutely no guarantee of any sort of financial gain. As stated earlier, there are other work-from-home opportunities that are far more secure and come equipped with a steady payday. And being your own boss isn’t the sipping Mai Tais under a beach umbrella fantasy you imagine it to be. First off, there’s no one to delegate all the donkey work to, and your brain doesn’t simply punch out when the working day has ended. Writing–and the guilt of not writing–never leaves you in peace until the article/book/screenplay/project has been completed.
4. It would be amazing to see my best-selling book in a bookstore/my script turned into a blockbuster feature film/win the Pulitzer Prize for my groundbreaking article series.
Who wouldn’t want any of those things? While we’re daydreaming, I’d also like to be an astronaut so that I can save the planet from extraterrestrial threats, be the smartest man in any room I’m in so that I can solve all the world’s problems and become Earth President, and build a safe-box time machine–that protects me from any sort of injury–equipped with a high end movie camera in order to jump back and forth in time to make the ultimate series of historical documentaries.
Now that my feet have touched terra firma and I’m once again grounded in reality, I can tell you that while it’s great to dream big, fame is one of the worst reasons to choose writing as a profession.
But the post wasn’t really working for me because I could feel myself getting snarkier as the piece went on, which wasn’t my intent going in. So, I decided to step off my soapbox and kill the post. And there it sat in my trash for days, forgotten like Charlie-In-The-Box, Dolly, Spotted Elephant, and King Moonracer. But it miraculously survived deletion during my numerous trash emptying sessions. This had to be a sign. What sign, I hadn’t the faintest, but I decided to attempt recycling it into a less judgmental, more positive message:
Writers are born critics who will criticize any and everything that crosses their paths, especially fellow writers. They will issue their assessments and commentary with the righteousness of having had their opinions validated by the Mount Horeb burning bush. These are the writers who cut open veins and bleed for the love of the craft, whose skulls ring with haunting voices that cannot be silenced until exorcized onto the page, who believe in their heart of hearts that the only words that deserve to be written are the truths that need to be told.
I can’t lie, sometimes I feel the same way.
But I’m not as bothered by it anymore because I know first hand that the writing process has it’s own way of weeding out the fly-by-night scribblers, posers and pretenders with the obstacles it scatters on the long and winding path to a completed project. Whether your driving force is money, fame. to impress a person/people, burning need, or love of the artform, you will still experience your fair share of procrastination, anxiety, writers block, time crunches, lack of motivation, fear of rejection, judgment of peers, and impatience of selling a piece.
If you can repeatedly bash your head into these walls, get up, dust yourself off and continue to write, who am I to question your motives? That, my friends, is the best I can do fer ya, today.
My mother warned me to guard the things I held precious by keeping them hidden inside me. The only thing I held precious was her and I found it impossible to place her inside my body. I was too young to understand she was talking about love. Too young to save the best parts of my mother’s love in my heart. Too consumed by the hate caused by her leaving me on my own. Too young to accept that death comes to us all.
It was hard to hold onto her love. Hard because I watched her body decay and rot away to nothingness. I watched to see the precious things she kept inside her and where she managed to hide them so I could do the same. I never found them. I watched as I picked vermin from her flesh and fought away carrion from her decaying form, until the day she was unrecognizable to me.
In particular, I watched her heart. Who knew what was inside there but I knew it was fragile because my mother spoke many times about how it had been broken. She said, “Sometimes you have to break a heart to find out how strong it really is.”
But when her heart became visible, I couldn’t see any cracks. I watched it as it bruised like an apple and disintegrated away. Nothing inside it but emptiness. I was hoping to see love—even though I had no idea what love looked like—or at least be privy to some secret that would explain the world to me. I found none of those things.
Her heart was a chamber for maggots. That was what my mother kept precious. Little disgusting creatures that fed off her body. They were everywhere. Stripping my mother of her beauty.
It grew harder to remember her face. I tried to recall the last time I saw her eyes or her smile but that memory was too distant in the past, lost in the forest of forgetfulness.
Occasionally I dreamt of my mother, standing in a room somewhere I had never been but yet felt so familiar to me, her face was a storm. Clouds roiled where features should have been. When she spoke, her voice was a swarm of black bees the drained the life of anything it touched. The bees blotted out the room and ate a pet dog I only had in dreams and never in real life, before coming for me.
I would run from the house and through the trees, down a dirt path that led to a black pond of brackish water. The water called to me and I was torn for the water was frightening, but so too were the bees who devoured trees on their way to eat me.
No real choice at all, I dove into the pond and discovered the water was actually tar and I was being pulled in, just as other creatures foolish enough to make the same mistake, the same fear-based choice as I had.
My nose and mouth filled with hot thick liquid, bitter molasses that scorched my insides, and melted me like butter on the griddle.
I woke alone in the dark, choking for air, my chest weighted with the heaviness of fear. My breathing was a thick, wet noise like someone sloshing through mud — or tar! — and I no longer felt safe in this world, so I did the only thing I could think to do.
I crawled inside the remains of my mother’s body and wrapped her tight around me so that I could be the thing she kept precious.
Sally forth and be keeping things preciousingly writeful.
The first he had known nearly all his life, from age four, if a proud mother’s braggadocio was to be believed. The second he only recently discovered, when he first laid eyes on The Woman. As was his nature, Evan quickly tabulated the absolute value in his head to assess his chances with her. The figures hadn’t added up.
The Woman, obviously accustomed to being the object of men’s stares, avoided eye contact with every XY chromosome in the room as she stood in the doorway and scanned the tables for a place to sit. There were so many free spaces, Evan hadn’t given the possibility of her settling next to him a second thought… until she did just that.
Suddenly the nearness of her had Evan checking the computations of his existence and wondering how he came to live a life so cruel as to deny him the reality of waking up beside The Woman every single morning. The closer she stepped, the more he realized just how lacking he was. The more he examined himself, the further away he pushed the percentages of the two of them spending the rest of their lives together.
But even though he knew down to his square root that nothing could ever have existed between them, he couldn’t let the thought of her go. He wracked his brain trying to suss out what needed to be done to correct their blaring parities.
What charismatic calculus would he have had to perform in order to make the possibility of a relationship between them a reality? What was he lacking that could have been excavated from the untapped depths of his soul in this limited time they cohabitated at this table, these minutes that were passing far too quickly. that would have given her pause? What prime number would have made her consider the impossible? Convinced her to go against every single internal voice and take a chance on a fractioned man well past his sell-by date? A man who needed her greater than she would ever have needed him?
Instead of coming up with solutions to solve the theorem, he vapor locked. He went to the place where he should have found inspiration and courage and instead stood staring down at a dry well.
If this were a movie, a romantic comedy following a by-the-numbers formula, this would have been their meet cute moment, where though she had no time for him, Evan would somehow have found the nerve to punch above his weight class, as he swung for the fences, until he stumbled upon that one right sentence, quite by accident, that would have opened the door of their budding relationship just a crack.
But this wasn’t a movie in which Evan had access to some writer, a prince of prose, to whip up a witty bit of icebreaking banter, which meant he sat there quiet as a church mouse as the woman of his dreams failed to acknowledge his presence as she sipped her small yet overpriced mall beverage and worked her delicate thumbs across her smartphone keypad.
Perhaps he had approached it wrong. His shyness and lack of confidence in this situation was the problem, but all problems had a solution, so if he somehow broke down the math of the moment, he could not only solve the equation but restructure the formula to his benefit.
And so he began with
The Problem
He was absolutely enchanted by this stranger, who, when she left this table, wouldn’t have known him from Adam due to his insecurities. And while the thought of either tricking or forcing her to have affection for him against her will was a repulsive notion, he wanted to at least put forth the concept of a relationship between them.
The Equation
The left-hand side of the equation needed to describe the geometry of the manifestation of what a man considered love and the lengths he would go through to achieve it. The right-hand side needed to reflect the concomitant swirling curvature of a woman’s nurture and passion weighed against the romanticized notions of love.
Evan pulled a tattered notebook from his backpack and wrote the equation. Front and back on all the blank pages. On the backs of pages containing non-related items. In the margins. On every napkin he laid his hands on. and finally on the table itself.
He wrote and wrote until his brain collapsed under the sheer weight of computations, then he wrote some more. He continued to write until he finally discovered…
The Solution
Evan straightened his back, turned to The Woman, cleared his throat and said in a voice squeakier than he would have liked, “Excuse me, Miss. Hello, my name is Evan.”
Because of the argument with her mother, Lakshmi wasn’t able to sleep. It happened ten days ago to this very minute and her hatred for her mother hadn’t abated one iota. Truth to tell, she wasn’t able to remember who started the argument or what the initial disagreement was about, but, as with most feuds, it opened a doorway for all the other things, the niggling bits of minutia to spill out and words were exchanged and feeling were hurt on both sides.
Ten days of freezing her mother out. Ten days of refusing to eat or talk or even be in the same room as her mother. Ten nights of lying awake in bed, staring at the headlights of passing cars that trailed rectangles across her ceiling. Lakshmi knew every inch of the ceiling and walls of her room like the back of her hands… which was why she was shocked when her eyes fell upon the crack.
It was beside the mirror that sat atop her chest of drawers, a horizontal crack no longer than a foot in length that looked like a demonic smile. Lakshmi stared at the crack, long and hard, wondering how she had missed something so obvious before… when it blinked. All right, so maybe blinked wasn’t the proper word, but she could have sworn she saw a light flicker from within the crack.
Probably just the wiring, she thought as she pushed a chair against the wall beneath the crack. At night Lakshmi heard mice scurrying between the walls. One of them must have nibbled on a wire and exposed it. She’d have to remember to tell her father in the morning. She was sure it had to be a fire hazard.
Lakshmi stood on the chair and inspected the crack, running her index finger along its jagged yet smooth edge. It was surprisingly cold to the touch and she thought she felt a slight suction… then the flicker again.
This time she was sure she hadn’t imagined it. Lakshmi leaned forward and stared into the crack and was surprised to see something within it. She saw…
Herself.
It was like watching a movie. She watched herself being herself, doing the things she normally did, but not in any day she ever remembered. The images began at a normal pace then sped up to such a degree where to anyone else they would have appeared to be nothing but a blur but Lakshmi was able to follow along because she was somehow connected to them. They were her personal images, of her life and she was living them, retaining the information contained within them.
Her eyes glued to the crack, Lakshmi watched the rest of her life, the entirety of her existence, literally flash before her:
Her relationship with her mother falls apart in a series of little spats over the next few years that leads to the big fight when she turns seventeen that causes irreparable damage. That will be the final time the two will ever speak to one another.
Her father grows miserable with all the constant fighting, which wears on his soul until he can’t take it anymore. Lakshmi cries uncontrollably the day he finally leaves their home for another woman. She begins smoking to handle the stress.
Her dream career of becoming a geophysicist vanishes that day she quits college for a job that allows her to move out of the family home and away from her mother for good.
She works so many menial jobs, none of which manages to hold her attention for very long, and slowly saps all the dreams and creativity she holds in reserve. With each successive job, the sheen in her eyes dulls a bit more.
As with the job situation, so, too, her love life. Her many attempts at love fail for the same reasons time and time again. Somehow, she becomes relationship poison and seeks out the same.
Eventually, her worries and frustrations in finding a mate causes her to settle for a man beneath her standards, a man who adds nothing to her life, a man who also works dead end job after job with no hope of career advancement.
Then comes the struggle to save money for secondhand furniture and a used car, and as rents increase, their apartments over the years become smaller and rattier.
She cries alone in the bathroom with a pregnancy test showing a positive result.
The birth of her daughter, Enid, is agonizing and when it’s done and the baby is placed in her arms, she knows she should feel something, tries to feel love, but the emotions just won’t come.
Not long after, she’s pregnant again with a premature boy this time, Jack, and makes the effort to spread the already nonexistent love even thinner.
Jack is born sickly and remains that way. Medical bills mount that they’re unable to pay, and her husband comes home later and later complaining of overtime that is never reflected in his paycheck.
Fed up, her husband leaves in much the same way that her father did, for another woman, and she now is forced to get a second job to make ends meet.
Her already distant relationship with her daughter grows volatile when Enid turns to drugs after running with a group of delinquents.
Jack’s condition worsens and neither her husband nor Enid are present at the hospital as he dies.
She develops a cough that turns into a hacking fit that turns into lung cancer that kills her a day before her sixty-sixth birthday. And like her son, she, too, dies alone.
Lakshmi thought the images would stop there, but was sadly mistaken. She was actually able to see beyond her own death, where Enid, holding a one-year Narcotics Anonymous recovery coin, arrives at her hospital room moments too late. Too late to apologize, too late to make amends, too late to say “I love you.” And the pain of this sends her running back to a den to score, where a fatal hot dose takes her life.
***
A noise, the sound of wood and plaster breaking in reverse, pulled Lakshmi away from the visions of her future and back into the room with such a quickness that she staggered back, fell off the chair, and hit the hardwood floor with a heavy thud.
A concerned woman’s voice called from outside the room and down the hall. Her mother. The woman she hated mere moments ago and wished all the nastiness a seven-year-old girl’s mind could muster… but now, there was something else. Something she couldn’t quite remember. The images of her future started jumbling inside her head to point they made no sense and turned into so much mental vapor.
Something about her father and her husband leaving? Something about a baby… a girl, or maybe a boy, sick and dying? And a fight, a big fight…
Lakshmi scrambled to her feet and raced out of the door and down the hall as memories evaporated from her mind. There was something she had to do, something before these feelings vanished and she went back to being angry.
Lakshmi burst into her parents room, where her father, just about to fall into a deep sleep, jumped at the girl’s sudden arrival.
Her mother, on the other hand, was fastening her dressing gown and about to investigate the sound from her daughter’s room, when her daughter rushed up, arms flung wide and embraced her.
“I’m sorry! I’m so sorry!” Lakshmi sobbed, as the memories of her future disappeared completely.
Her father watched in confusion. Her mother shrugged at him, smiled and stroked her daughter’s hair, cooing that everything will be all right. Everything will be just fine now.
***
In Lakshmi’s room, the crack in the wall, once the length of a wooden school ruler, began to shrink, as the wall knitted itself whole again.
“Mǣnōn
concede to me the quietude to recognize the effects I should not alter; the
bravery to transform the conditions I am able to; and insight to recognize the
distinction,” he leaned against the chain link fence, covered in less blood
than he first imagined and prayed to the moon.
Not the Moon, not Luna, the
other one, Mǣnōn, the illusory moon that sat back and to the left, that was
only visible every four years on the twenty-ninth of February.
***
He had
never been so disappointed in himself as he stared at the nubiles sauntering in
and out of the afterhours bars and nightclubs that lined the strip. The
passersby, those who bothered to toss him a sideward glance, sussed him as an
alcoholic, but his problem was far more severe than that.
His affliction stemmed from the
fact that everyone had two sides, no matter how open and honest they appeared
to be. There was the side they showed the world and the beast side that only
revealed its face when they were all alone. And it wasn’t necessarily as evil
as it sounded, but it was there nonetheless. And there was no way of really
knowing someone’s true nature unless they revealed it to you.
But he saw it. On this night, with
the gift he had been granted by the Goddess of a moon visible to no one but he,
which wasn’t a present as much as a curse that gnawed at his sanity. He saw the
true faces of evil that hunkered down within the tall brush of fashion, cosmetics,
and innocence. And sometimes the evil saw him.
He caught sight of a woman as she
appeared from one of the clubs, ultraviolet stamp still moist on the back of
her hand. Ten years his junior, she was stunningly beautiful in an exotic way
that unsettled him. Her auburn hair cascaded over the shoulders of her white
satin dress and gave her the appearance of an old-world masterpiece come to
life.
She walked past a Chinese take-out
joint and the exposed ATM before she realized she was being followed. When she
turned, he knew she had seen him for what he was as clearly as he had spotted
her. Her countenance shifted from serene beauty to that of a woodland creature
frozen in the headlights of a speeding vehicle. But it wasn’t fear that
registered in her eyes—she was making a decision, flight or fight.
The moment her face tightened with
determination, he knew she would rabbit. And she did. She spun on the balls of
her feet, kicked off her heels and bolted out into the street, dodging cars as
she ran against the traffic, inhuman toenails ripping into the tarmac.
He grinned as he whipped out past
the parked cars; he loved it when they ran. His reflexes, sharp normally, were
amped under the light of the illusory moon and hope blazed in his mind as he
was about to overtake her easily. In this mode, before what had to happen
actually happened, he saw himself as a savior. What he had to do was in
everyone’s best interest, even hers. He would not fail this time. He intended
to honor his duty. And as he was about to lay his hand on her shoulder and set
things right—he heard a wet thumping sound and felt pain down to his marrow as
a car bumper made contact with his hip and sent him sprawling into a lamppost.
Nausea and blood mixed his mouth
and as he looked up through blurred vision he could just make out her lithe
frame turning down a side street. A voice cried out amidst the murmurs in the
background, I’m sorry! it said. You came out of nowhere! I didn’t see
you in time!
Voices shouted and people rushed to
the scene from both sides of the street. He fought the pain and forced himself
to his feet. He had to leave before the police showed up. Too many witnesses.
He couldn’t have explained why he was chasing the girl in the first place. Who
would have believed him? To bystanders, he surely must have looked like a
psycho ex-boyfriend or worse, a perverted sex deviant.
He kept his head low and shielded
his face from camera phones as he pushed through a crowd of people asking if he
was okay, hobbling towards the side street, hoping against hope that he hadn’t
lost her trail.
***
He still
couldn’t fathom why he was chosen. Had he been a cop or any other branch of law
enforcement, this might have been so much easier. Easier to pursue, apprehend
and deal with a special brand of evil one night every four years. But as a
thirty-seven-year-old accountant, what was he supposed to do? How long could
this go on before he was caught, or even worse killed? He had no social life
and how could he? This thing made him unfit for human consumption. And what if
he managed to hook with a woman only to see, come February twenty-ninth, what
sort of demon lurked beneath her cool surface? He knew he had to quit at some
point. Maybe tonight, if he was able to resolve this in time he would petition
Mǣnōn to find a replacement.
Along with his heighten abilities
came the urge. He needed to scour the streets and rid the city of
pestilence on this very special of nights. It was a basic bodily function to
him, as much a part of his continued existence as breathing.
He limped around the corner, his
pace picking up as his fractured bones knitted themselves back together and his
muscles and internal organs returned to their optimal state. The neighborhood
wasn’t the safest to begin with and those with sense stayed on the strip in
crowded well-lit areas. The side street was dark, streetlamps busted on both
sides, which was probably why she chose it to escape into, to hide in.
He moved into the street and swiped
a finger across a bit of dug up tarmac, touched it to his tongue, and smacked
his lips, processing the taste of her. Motionless, twilight settled on him as
he cleared his mind—then he picked up her trail.
***
“You
don’t have to do this,” the woman called out from somewhere in the dark.
“Yes, I do,” he stood at the mouth
of the alley and scanned the blackness as his eyes adjusted to the starlight.
She was well hidden.
“I haven’t hurt anyone.”
“Yet,” he spat. “You should come
out, you really should. It’ll be so much easier for you than if I have to tear
this alley apart to find you.”
The woman eased herself to her feet,
stepping from a darker shadow within the shadows, shaking off the alley debris
like an octopus coming out of hiding.
“Please, let me go,” her voice, as
soft as a butterfly’s footfall, was the sincerest plea he had ever heard from
one of these demons. She stared at him, eyes watering, lips pursed into a small
quivering bow. It was clear she wanted to live.
“That isn’t the way this works. The
earth must be cleansed of all unnatural beasts.”
“W-wait…” her shaky hand reached
down to fumble at the clasp of the handbag slung across her shoulder.
He thought she was going for some
sort of weapon but what could she have been carrying in such a tiny purse that
could hurt him we he was like this, at the zenith of human abilities? Although
he wasn’t afraid, his body tensed reflexively, ready to pounce. And he was hit
with that thought again, of how incredibly stunning his prey was even in her
beastly form. Her hair, slimy from alley gunge, hung in her face like a tangle
of dead eels but it couldn’t hide her eyes which were larger than he had ever
seen on a living creature.
“All beasts must be cleansed? No
exception?” she asked.
“None.”
“Have you seen yourself?” the woman
pulled a compact mirror from her bag and held it up, catching the faintest bit
of night light.
His expression shifted from
predator to absolute horror. His jaw clenched, clamping down upon a shriek, and
the grip loosened on his anger. He dropped down on his haunches. She was right.
In the reflection, he could see that he was a beast, no different than she. It
took a beast to catch a beast, he supposed. And he did the only sensible thing
he could have thought to do.
***
Up against the chain link fence, he
dug his claws into his own chest and tore out his heart, marveling at how little
blood there was.
“Living one moon at a time;
enjoying one solstice at a time; tolerating adversity as the conduit to
tranquility; acquiring, as you do, this aberrant humanity as it is, not as I
would wish it; believing that you will set all things right if I submit to your
command; that I may be satisfied in this life and rewarded with you forever in
the next,” his guttural voice trailed off to a whisper.
And when he had completed his prayer, Mǣnōn, the
illusory moon, embraced his spirit with open arms.
Ideas, or
story inspirations, come from the unlikeliest of places and often strike when
you least expect it. This one came about while I was viewing a trailer for the
Kevin Costner movie, Mr. Brooks, that begins with him reciting the
Serenity Prayer while staring at bottles of liquor on a shelf, so the logical
assumption is that he’s an alcoholic but his actual problem runs along a
different, darker line—if you’re interested in the true nature of his problem,
view the trailer, the movie isn’t the subject of this introduction, the thought
that it inspired is.
The trailer made me think about the
dichotomy, the two mostly equal parts of peace and war, love and hate, and
the black and white delineation of so-called good and evil that exist within us
all.
The story itself doesn’t really
tackle or explore the characteristics of duality but that’s the nature of an
idea, isn’t it? It never ends up on the page the way it began life in your grey
matter before being put through the meat grinder process of dramatic structure.
*Inspired by the song “Search and Destroy” by Sanders Bohlke
I do not have a favorite season, per se, but whenever summer rolls around, my head swims with near endless possibilities of how I can alter not only my reality but the reality of existence itself so that I am finally able to live a life in which my head falls on the pillow with no worries and I awaken the same manner.
But at this moment any life other than my own would be an improvement. You must understand, when you live in the gutter, climbing up onto the pavement can feel like reaching Shamayim, the first heaven, but there is not much chance of climbing that high. My wings, or what is left of them, have not been able to bear my weight for quite some time now.
And I am not alone. I lie here amongst the other bodies that convulse on a human Richter scale that makes it impossible to pray and have those prayers heard. My lips, dry and cracked haven’t kissed another in a century of lifetimes, though I myself have been kissed by a fate who cruelly calls my name and announces my presence, the King of Wretches Among Wretches. This fate who comes down from on high feigns love for me, lifts my head slightly and kisses me deeply and passionately before abandoning me without uttering a word.
So here I exist, an enemy of sleep as I am cursed to remain awake and endure, trying to mask my terror because I was instructed to know no fear but I feel my reserve crack and my secret dreads are beginning to seep through. Left for dead but not truly dead, I sometimes raise myself to my full height and threaten to leave but Those Who Know realize this is an empty threat. My soul is anchored to this spot and even though I can beseech the wind to lift away this all too fleshy carapace, what would I be without that which makes me unique? What sort of life would a soulless one be?
Alas, I am far too proud to beg, even for mercy. Accepting charity never seemed quite fitting to me, which means I stay in anger and at the dawn of each new day I let the carrion pick away at the bits of me that have gone necrotic from disuse. I curse the fact that when they take to the sky they never steal away the bits that made me the monster that led me to be in this predicament in the first place. It is as if the universe believes its very own balance is better with me assuming this role.
The sad truth is that not all dead are buried in the field with the flowers. Some lie rotting away to nothing, slowly dying from wounds that never heal. The minor injuries you suffer repeatedly every single day that rip the scabs off to bleed you anew. It is the slowest death imaginable. Where you die a little more on each anniversary.
And in time these injuries celebrate anniversaries, birthdays, and even holidays. And you cry outwardly until the tears no longer come, then you cry inwardly and when people cannot see you weep, they assume that you have moved on and think it is acceptable to pretend the bad thing never happened and things can return to normal, without realizing that there is no longer a normal to return to.
The parent of dead hopes and dreams never stops being a parent in their hearts. And you spend the rest of your life gathering the leftover pieces and remnants of a future life well past its sell-by date and inhume it in the backyard of years gone by in a specially constructed box of disappointment.
Kylie heard there were people who actually had the luxury of choosing whether or not to be a fucking asshole. She, unfortunately, was not one of those lucky shitheads. Her great grandfather was an old-fashioned asshole who begat an even bigger asshole, who begat the king of all assholes, who married the high exalted queen bitch asswipe, better known as the person she called Mommy Whorest. All this to illustrate why Kylie felt she wasn’t totally responsible for the way she was. Not so fucking easy to be a goddammed pillar of the community when the gene pool you’re pulled from was a shitty septic tank.
The other genetic trait she inherited was the uncanny ability to choose the absolute douchiest mate. Enter: Simon. Ever much the prick match to her assholosity, only he wasn’t merely a prick to her, sometimes he was a cunt, too. They were made for one another, the most fearsome twosome since the Kray brothers. And as long as they had a mutual target to focus their hatred on, they maintained wedded bliss. When no target presented itself, they turned on one another like rabid ass dogs.
There was only one person on the entire face of the planet who was spared their abusive wrath, Ms. Brittany Anne, their daughter. The only thing they gave two shits about because she was the only thing the pair created that remained unsullied by the shitstorm of their separate and combined fucked up worlds. And as the only thing they had ever gotten goddammed right, Brittany Anne was the only thing they would have abso-fucking-lutely died for, no hesitation, no questions asked.
So, when their marriage shit the bed for the final time, Kylie told Simon he could keep the house, the car, everything in the joint account, the whole ball of wax, just as long as she got Brittany.
Of course, Simon was having none of that and they wound up in court, which to Kylie was the stupidest move he could have made. He ate his balls in the courtroom. He was a living off the grid, import/export, bootlegging sonuvabitch who looked like dogshit warmed over on paper. Hadn’t taken the judge long to award her full custody, but she knew in her heart of bastard hearts that the motherfucking court order wasn’t anything but a piece of paper to wipe her ass with.
It took Simon less than four hours to enlist the aid of his brothers, who Kylie knew to be a bunch of fake fucking tough guys who swore they had King Kong sized balls simply because they watched Scarface and Goodfellas on a continuous DVD loop. And when Kylie was in the kitchen microwaving Kraft Macaroni and Cheese dinner, those shitbirds kidnapped her daughter.
Being there wasn’t an Einstein among them and together their collective IQ couldn’t reach room temperature, Kylie knew exactly where they were holding Brittany. The hot house. It was where Simon operated his numerous non-corporate businesses, a tiny hovel where his inbred fucktard brothers shacked up when their whore mother threw their shiftless asses out. It was also a shitty crack den that sat in the otherwise decent residential neighborhood like an infected, bloody hemorrhoid. One that was definitely getting lanced tonight.
After Kylie cased the house and picked the best spot for her approach, she drew her piece, the assault rifle pushing its way from under her denim duster. Simon always accused her of having penis envy, and if that was the case then this bitch of a rifle was her goddammed hard on!
Lep stepped out of the front door, planted his feet on the porch and turned his gat Kylie’s way. The gun was a piece of shit .44 he bought out of a Kmart shopping cart from some dude with a serious boner for Clint Eastwood.
The youngest of all the brothers, Lep’s real name was Earl but his brothers gave him the moniker due to his height and bizarre resemblance to a leprechaun. Four foot if he was an inch and at least two feet of that was head. Combined with his high pitch laugh, he had a nickname that stuck for life.
Even thirty feet away and caught off guard, Kylie had more than enough time to clean this asshat’s clock. She whirled around and squeezed her trigger. His oversized head came apart like a pumpkin in a microwave. To his credit, he managed to take a few steps forward and pulled his trigger before he collapsed, but the shot went wild, missing Kylie by a mile.
Lep was the rare brother who had never really done anything to Kylie and for the briefest of instances, she kind of felt sorry for him. But he did try to shoot her, so fuck him, that dancing under rainbows, gold hoarding, headless motherfucker!
The sound of the rifle shot was bound to bring out the rest of the boys so Kylie put a little pep in her step as she walked toward the house.
Slick Sid, the middle brother with the oily, bad skin, was next out of the house and his face went slack the moment his eyes fell on Lep’s body. He started screaming. Screaming like the little bitch he was. Kylie though. Mouth going off like a little pussy siren.
When Sid saw Kylie coming at him, rifle leveled, his hand shot down to the pistol in his waistband, even while he continued to scream. She could have shot his dumb ass but chose not to. Maybe hadn’t even needed to.
By the time Sid’s gun cleared his waistband, Kylie was on top of him. Rifle butt to the family jewels doubled him over, then an elbow to the jaw knocked him down to the hardwood porch deck. Sid’s hand twitched on the pistol grip which made Kylie stomp down on his jaw with a horrible crunch.
“Where is she?” Kylie’s voice was controlled rage. Sid made a noise that Kylie took to be “Who?” Maybe smashing his jaw wasn’t the best idea.
“My daughter, bitch! Where’s my child?” Kylie knelt down and pried the pistol from Sid’s hand. She placed the muzzle on his temple and cocked the piece.
Call it self-preservation or simply blind luck but Sid’s hand shot up and clutched the gun in a manner so that the meat of his hand between thumb and forefinger blocked the hammer from firing.
Kylie was caught off guard as Sid twisted the gun out of her grip, spun the barrel in the opposite direction and squeezed the trigger.
This mutherfucker! she thought as she took a gunshot to the stomach. Kylie grunted as she brought the shotgun up to his neck. Sid’s throat bloated with automatic rifle ammunition and burst, spitting a dark crimson stain on the bare hardwood.
Kylie pressed her back against the house near the front door, the worst possible place she could have been but the wound in her gut wasn’t letting her go anywhere.
“I know you heard the commotion, so you know I’m out here,” she yelled into the darkened doorway, putting pressure on her stomach to try to stop the bleeding. She prayed they couldn’t detect the pain in her voice. “Si, can you hear me? Two of yours are dead. Didn’t need to be that way. Just give my daughter back unharmed and we’ll call it quits. How’s that sound to you?”
Kylie thought she heard someone running inside the house but couldn’t be sure over the sound of her own heart in her ears as blood continued to ooze from her belly. Unbeknownst to her, Gabby Otis, the mute brother, crept around the side of the house and would have had her dead to rights if he hadn’t stepped on a loose floorboard.
The creak snapped Kylie to attention. She brought the shotgun around and blew the bottom part of Otis’ right leg clean off his body. The man dropped face first off the porch…but never let go of the gun.
Otis’ gun came up over the lip of the porch deck, shakily trying to target Kylie. She put the man in her sights and pulled the trigger. Jammed.
Kylie cursed and squeezed her bullet-pierced stomach as she grabbed the rifle by the barrel and swung it at Otis’ hand. Not a direct hit but the butt connected with enough force to send the gun flying off into the unkempt lawn grass.
Kylie angled the rifle butt at Otis’ head, connected and did it once more for good measure. Otis’ eyes fluttered close as he lost consciousness. His head still in striking distance, she aimed the rifle butt again, catching him full on this time. The left side of Otis’s head caved in and blood squirted from his right ear.
Without warning, Kylie cried out in agony as she was blown forward by the impact of a bullet in her back. She tumbled over the porch railing and landed face first in the grass. Though every movement was pure agony, Kylie twisted her head and struggled to understand what she was looking at.
Brittany Anne, the young girl with clear traces of her mother in her face, a face that was now a mask of fury covered with a sheen of tears, held a pistol in her tiny trembling hands.
Kylie tried to ask her daughter, “Why?” but only managed to cough blood as her mouth formed the word. A shadow fell over Kylie.
“No one took her, you dumb cunt,” the familiar voice said. “She came to me on her own. She wants to live with her daddy right now. Isn’t that right, pumpkin?”
Kylie lifted her head up from the grass, trailing threads of pink saliva and blood, in time to see her little girl nod her head.
“But, if you want to stay,” Simon said, “there’s one thing I’m going to need you to do. Remember what it was?”
Brittany Anne nodded a second time and answered, “Kill Mommy.”
“What? No!” Kylie said as the pistol in Brittany Anne’s hand went off a second time.
In the beginning of what most believed in their heart of hearts to be the End of Days, there was The Distant Signal. It came in the form of a definitive and verified multi-language message broadcast to all the countries of Earth simultaneously.
What should have been a moment of joyous acknowledgment that we were not alone in the universe, was tainted by a subliminal signal that triggered an automatic flight response in all the various and sundry life forms on the planet.
Dubbed The Great Terror by the media, it opened the door to speculation about the global impact alien contact might have on world governments, organized religions, stock markets, and most importantly human existence.
Then came news of the one person on the planet unaffected by the subliminal signal.
His business card was made of carbon-fiber reinforced thermoplastic. Laser etched in red on the back was his phone number, four digits, no area or country code, because it wasn’t needed. The number could be dialed from anywhere in the world, toll-free. The front of the card delivered the most accurate message any business card ever had. It told the bearer exactly who he was in two simple words:
The Man
Normally slang that referred to either the government, an authority in a position of power, or a drug dealer — which he had no issue with, as he had allegedly been all those things in his youth — it currently served as a term of respect and praise.
The Man had no official credit rating, never owned a bank account, and his fingers never knew the texture of cash. His currency was the Boon License, a service performed, payable by a service at his behest.
The Man never advertised his services, and thanks to a universal binary code, he wasn’t searchable on the internet. His legend was viral, spread word of mouth from those who benefited from his services. The downside of this Chinese whispers campaign were all the old wives’ tales that attached themselves to his accomplishments like gossip remoras:
He was incapable of telling the truth and he gained supernatural powers by winning a bet with the Devil in a liar’s competition.
He thrived on the broken hearts of virgins after he stole the purest form of love from them.
He was born without a soul.
He was a genetic engineering experiment using stem cell materials that hadn’t been able to be duplicated.
He was born with one hundred percent brain capacity and as a result, has all the information stored on every computer and the internet in his brain.
He averted World War Three by winning the jackpot in a poker game with the world’s superpowers.
For a person who bartered in boons, how could he resist collecting favors from the entire planet? But when The Man accepted the offer, he scoured governments, both domestic and foreign, for help, with absolutely no success.
Once The Man signed the contract, he was elected to make first contact, and the world leaders resigned from their posts and contingency plans were underway to build underground shelters. He could not find a government, nation, country or individual to stand by his side.
The final extraterrestrial message contained a set of coordinates for the rendezvous point. Although no one would stand by him, he was able to call in several favors to arrange transport to one of the remote volcanic islands in the South Atlantic Ocean, Tristan da Cunha.
The alien armada arrived like a meteor storm, ships of shifting geometrics burned through Earth’s mesosphere and parked themselves in the stratosphere around the entire planet so that they blotted out the sun.
Plunged into darkness, The Man stood his ground as a lone, illuminated craft, smaller than the other ships, descended to the rendezvous point and touched down on the soil light as a feather.
The ship altered its form and peeled itself away from its passenger and repurposed itself into a ramp. The alien glided forward. It existed on the outer fringes of humanoid description but The Man found its features and its form somehow alluring.
The alien handed him a card with strange markings and upon contact with his skin, the card pricked his thumb and took a DNA sample. The markings changed, cycling through alphabets until it hit his native earthbound English. When all the letters were in place, it simply read:
The object of this Survival Manual is to save the lives of off-worlders who are, if distant and recent history have anything to impart, on the endangered species list in this society of humans.
I started writing out rules of survival for my hatchling, Kuul, and I suddenly thought, “Why be selfish? Why not devise a set of directions for all extraterrestrials living on earth?” This manual is meant for extraterrestrial eyes only. If you are human and reading this, stop at once! This datafile has been encoded with an ultraliminal agent which causes blindness and hair to grow on your palms. Everyone you encounter from this point on will dismiss you as a wanton masturbator.
There are instructions available also, for protecting off-world children, and directions for groups wishing to set up Extraterrestrial Survival programs to teach survival to young off-worlders in school settings. (See: Appendix)
Knowledge is not only strength, but also the first step toward identifying the problems of staying alive and healthy. You should know what is happening in your city. Your local National ExtraTerrestrial Awareness and Safety Program (NETASP), Urban League, Church, Neighborhood Block Association, Off-Worlder Civil Liberties Unions and other groups should have information for you on the problems that extraterrestrials are experiencing in your area. Also, local newspapers will have a few of the reports. Ideally, parents, teachers, friends, social workers and legal professionals should set up Off-Worlder Survival hotlines so that extraterrestrials can report their cases and have them documented. Those organizations should be contacted for guidance in setting up documentation centers to collect Off-Worlder Survival statistics as a basis for Off-Worlder Survival Programs.
To survive in your own neighborhood, and in anyone else’s, there is something you must understand: even though the so-called “Off-Worlder Leaders” and the human media, for differing reasons, keep talking about “universal togetherness,” it isn’t necessarily the truth. Unless you are a twin or a symbiote, you were born by yourself – and you must take care of yourself. It is time to face the truth: some of the humans in and out of your neighborhood are robbing and killing extraterrestrials. So when you are walking and playing around in the city streets, you are going to have to remember to be constantly on your toes and aware of who is near you, and where you are – you are outside your house.
This is not meant to scare you – only to prevent you from walking around in the “dream state” we see so many off-worlders in – which begs for humans to knock them over their heads.
EXTRATERRESTRIAL SURVIVAL CRITICAL RULES
Rule #1: If you are hailed by a government official: run like hell! If apprehended, at the very least, you will be subjected to bizarre sexual rituals and experimentation. The worse case scenario is being the victim of a televised autopsy.
Rule #2: Always carry the Little Green Book with you. Fill in the fields right now; carry this datafile with you at all times. If you are apprehended by the humans, hand over the file freely. When the ultraliminal agent kicks in, make a break for it.
Rule #3: Find out the name of the commanding officer of the nearest secret government facility and memorize it. If you encounter government personnel you can, if you get the chance, mention the Commander’s name. Helpful hint: Do this before the autopsy begins.
Rule #4: Always carry a neural disruptor and personal teleportation device. Humans are particularly susceptible to weapons that attack the nervous system, and your teleporter should have a transporting range of at least 100 kilometers.
Rule #5: Take the time, when there is no immediate need for a lawyer, to find one who can represent you and memorize their telephone number. In making your selection, you should avoid lawyers who advertise on television, promising quick cash settlements.
Rule #6: Report trouble to the nearest news agency. When you are attacked, robbed, mugged, beaten or whatever, report it, even if the news agency doesn’t believe you, chances are they may run your story on a slow news night. Make sure you avoid tabloids generally found at the supermarket checkout counters, except of course for The National Inquirer and The Daily Mail.
Rule #7: When you are approached by government officials, take this time to show your race’s superiority. Do not show government officials that you are a docile “I come in peace” alien. If you have a superior ability — use it. If you don’t — fake it. Most times a human’s fear of the unknown will freeze them in their tracks. Make loud, intimidating threats, jerky gestures, and point at them menacingly. In the off chance that they draw weapons, hightail it. There’s no real shame in blatant cowardice.
Rule #8: Memorize the name of any government official involved in a current sex scandal. Mention the official’s name at the moment of your capture. This is merely a delaying tactic, and will most likely avail you naught, but wouldn’t it be fun to bring down a human with you in the process?
Rule #9: Do not carry plans for world domination on your person. The reasoning behind this should be self evident, and if it isn’t, then you deserve to get caught.
Rule #10: Do not show humans your plans to build a device with the power to crack the planet in half. Even if the humans are your closest friends, chances are they’re just a little more attached to the planet than you are.
Rule #11: When you leave or enter your apartment, look around first. If you spot men in dark business suits or a florist van that hasn’t moved in three days, relocate quickly. The government is on to you. Pack your things and go gently into that good night.
Rule #12: Avoid government and military installations. Duh.
Rule #13: If for some reason you cannot avoid government or military installations, try to look as human as possible. Novelty shops sell a variety of human masks and costumes that should serve you more than adequately. Helpful hint: Avoid masks bearing the likeness of celebrities. Richard Nixon going on a tour of the White House would bring you more attention than is desired.
Rule #14: If you are in the hospital, verify that the physician is licensed to treat your race in particular. All too often a physician will take a correspondence course in Venusian medicine and feel that he/she can now properly diagnose all off-worlders, regardless of their planet of origin.
Rule #15: Do not drink any substance that will lead to intoxication. Okay, so a glass of turpentine once a week with a meal maybe won’t hurt you.
Rule #16: Do not take drugs. Unless, of course, they’re mandatory to your survival in this alien atmosphere, and even then, stick to the recommended dosage. There’s nothing worse that seeing a Vemtraxor hopped up on methane pills.
Rule #17: Do not smoke. This applies to all races except Nentokites, who intake sustenance this way. It also does not apply to those races that emit smoke from their pores naturally.
Rule #18: Do not drink milk! It is evil! In certain parts of the galaxy, milk has achieved sentience and is overthrowing entire planets! Stay away from it! You have been warned!
Rule #19: If you are a carnivorous race — avoid eating humans. I know this can be difficult at times (I mean just how many times can you eat cows and pigs and fowl, before becoming bored?) but the planet on a whole frowns on the practice…so abstain, okay? Or at least eat as little human flesh as possible. And no deep-frying, please. Human meat is greasy enough.
Rule #20: Ask your native healers about high blood pressure treatments and how to prevent enlargement of the prostate gland and unnecessary surgery. Have you ever seen a Venturon with an enlarged prostate? Not a pretty sight, let me tell you.
Rule #21: Do not join the armed forces. Chances are, during wartime, you will be given a name such as Private Cannon Fodder and be appointed permanent Point Man status.
Rule #22: Learn to read, write and speak earth languages correctly. Do you want to earn more money? Sure. We all do. Take advantage of financial aid and register for courses in Algebra, Biology, Chemistry, Physics, American Government, World History, Atomic Weapon Repair, or get your specialized degree.
Rule #23: Finally, join the nuclear freeze movement. Stop humans from exploring the full potential of nuclear power. If we are successful in slowing this process down, the other worlds might have a chance to play catch-up.
***
GETTING BACK ON TRACK
This section is for you extraterrestrials who are doing drugs including alcohol, robbing banks and stores, mugging, raping, trying to scare humans, making humans pregnant without doing your part to prevent pregnancies or not caring for the hybrids when they are born, and killing humans. This extraterrestrial Survival manual is not for you, because you are either too stupid, lazy or inconsiderate to use more discretion! Yes, these pastimes are fun, and we all enjoy them, but must you be so blatant? If you continue on your current path, we will consider you part of the enemy and when the day of reckoning is at hand, you will suffer along with the humans you terrorized so publicly. End of sermon.
***
APPENDIX
If you have trouble with the government, write news agency based on the format below:
Name (Earth phonetics, if possible)
Address
Date
Name of news agency contact
News agency Address
Dear contact name,
On (date) at (time) (exact location), Government Employee (name[s]) INCLUDE ALL THAT APPLIES:
Beat me…
Called me names, ethnic slurs…
Took me against my will to a government facility without explanation…
Searched my house/space craft without a warrant…
Confiscated sperm/ovum samples without permission…
Forced me to participate on a FOX Network primetime special with no compensation…
Other…
I demand restitution.
Sincerely,
Your Name
cc: Government Bias Unit Commander of your local secret military installation, Mayor of your city, Your Congressperson Local Extraterrestrial Survival Documentation Center
***
You may have to ask a local organization like NETASP or Urban League, Church, Neighborhood Block Association, Off-Worlder Civil Liberties Unions to set up an Extraterrestrial Survival Documentation Center.
For instructions on setting up an Extraterrestrial Survival Documentation Center yourself, send $25 in your native currency (to cover postage and handling) to the address at the end of this datafile.
Until we are united on Invasion Day, think smart, live simply, and avoid milk. I cannot stress this enough.
Thank you for purchasing Rin Vagor’s The Little Green Book: Extraterrestrial Survival on Earth or Staying Alive and Well on an Institutionally Biased Planet. This datafile is intended for off-worlders who wish to face the harsh reality of living and dying on planet earth, those who do not want to blind their ocular senses, or cover their auditory faculties, or feel that “It can’t happen to me.”
At the very beginning of the file, you will have noticed a questionnaire. For your own protection, please take a moment to fill in the fields provided. In addition to your Earth information, you should also include:
Homeworld Address
Homeworld Subspace Frequency
Date of Birth/Spawning/Hatching/Other
Name/Address/Subspace Frequency of Nearest Homeworld Relative/Friend
Blood Type (if applicable)
Allergies
***
INTRODUCTION
The tricentennial anniversary of the Roswell Incident has sped up the angst in the planetwide debate concerning beings of extraterrestrial origin and the doubtful security of their right to exist. As it now develops, the extraterrestrial is not as revered as was the case in the days before first contact. Pictures of heroics by Roo’Lau, the Venusian, rising from beneath a ton of human football players after being tackled across the goal line; Miiinrt U, from Antares, dragging his burden of a human baseball team through a World Series; Poo Nebula, native Tenaxian, boxing her way to heavyweight championship; Ylaan, of Nentok IV, who with no arm appendages of any sort, defeated earthly golfers at their own game. They sometimes tempt us to forget how vulnerable the extraterrestrial really is on earth, the so-called shining gem of the cosmos.
We tend to forget the human police officer who sucked thirteen-year-old Jum Bokuur up in a shop vacuum cleaner, because all the officer saw was a purple, oozing mass, unaware that it was the normal, healthy and quite non-lethal Vespurian form. And now, Rin Vagor has invented a survival advisory for extraterrestrials. If her prescriptions succeed, she is entitled to a Nobel Prize in a new category, Extraterrestrial Survival.
It is amazing how little earth’s extremist ecology has changed since the time over fifty years ago when Na Ters confronted the United Nations with his documented book, We Come In Peace. Its graphic depiction of the wholesale slaughter of off-worlders by the human governments illustrated the mortal consequences of an endangered species. The changes have been semantic. It is now benign neglect that human society likes to emphasize. The suicides, murders, drug deaths and other rebuffs are somehow made more subtle and thus less like the government autopsies. Is the rhetoric less cruel? I think not. The law itself, the imagined protector of the defenseless and the downtrodden, bears the blame for extraterrestrial jeopardy.
Mr. Justice Lance Hasbrouck was asked by a Martian defendant to appoint counsel for him. The justice, speculating that there was a companion of the defendant who had not been found, said, “There’s another greenie in the woodpile.” Justice Hasbrouck is a devout Roman Catholic.
Mr. Justice Donald Franklin, sentencing a human defendant, was asked by counsel to place the man on probation, assuring the justice that his client could be rehabilitated. The judge practically snarled, “How’s he going to be rehabilitated, living in sin with that ET woman?” He posed that question three times in rapid succession.
Mr. Justice Thompson advised two Titanide defendants that they would not know the difference between a good lawyer and a quasar.
An Andromedan New York University student was pushed into an open manhole for kissing a human male classmate, as they stood in the street near the university. Upon contact with the raw sewage, the student evaporated into an odorless yellow mist.
An unemployed Tilosian, faced with a child support order, was told by a human judge to “phone home and have them beam you some money.”
A Betelgesan was told by a human judge to stop having mutant children or face castration.
And so it goes, with the scalpel of human society aimed at extraterrestrial testicles.
Extraterrestrials may not try to be heroic and hope to survive. The government uses off-worlders for target practice and they seldom miss. The great wonder is that earthbound extraterrestrials have not practiced undercover guerrilla warfare. Outnumbered and outgunned, any other effort to get even or to avenge off-worlder honor would invite disaster.
The Little Green Book is a reminder of the Survival Commandments we must honor.
