by J.R. Blackwell | Mar 6, 2006 | Story |
She let him make love to her. He smelled like new cars and cologne, he moved with a measured rhythm. Her mouth tasted like mint toothpaste. She looked over his shoulder through the white light of the window. She was sweating into her sheets, her breath silent, and her lips thin and tight.
She let him make love to her. Her husband was gone with a girl that he met through the Internet, a girl with pictures of her little waist and little breasts up for abandoned wives to see.
She let him make love to her, and when it was over, she switched him off. His eyes turned from liquid to glass. She forced his eyelids closed, feeling the mechanical tension resist as she clicked them into place.
by J.R. Blackwell | Mar 2, 2006 | Story
On the night Alpine Zanzibar died, that diva light, that genteel fantastic, the people that loved him bought him the moon. Together his friends pitched a fortune and purchased the lunar landscape for the entire night, inflicting their choices for the moon’s color on the entire earth. At 6PM the moon was a crisp blond color but at the strike of midnight it turned a dark and mysterious blue. The gold of that light was to celebrate the long life of Alpine Zanzibar, and the blue was to mourn his passing.
The party was at the Silver Swan, the establishment where Alpine Zanzibar held his bohemian court. The Silver Swan was not just bar, nor a cabaret, but the night home of the residents of Second Paris, a place were hearts were mended and souls found, glory on a honest to damn wooden stage. Years before most of the patrons had even been born, the genteel fantastic Alpine Zanzibar had opened the Silver Swan and had commenced the nightly revelry as the city of Second Paris grew around him. The party was part roast, part jazz funeral, but most of all like a birthday and all of it like the life of the man it celebrated, all glory, all fabulous fantastic.
Alpine Zanzibar himself appeared an hour into the festivities, having just emerged from a day spent with his closest friends, his created family, those brothers and sisters holding back their tears and throwing back bubbly drinks. He wore robes of shining purple and glistening blue, the colors of the evening, past the set sun.
In accordance with Zanzibar’s own request, they held the usual cabaret; girls dancing, the political puppet show outlining the faults of the United Parliament, the heckles and the teasing, the stripping and the finale, which Zanzibar sang himself. He sang his torch song, his familiar standard, the old love song, almost antiquated until Zanzibar put it past his lips.
Suddenly, as the last chord played, there was the sound of wild horses, and the laugher of women. From the cold autumn night, like a crisp wind blew in that proper villain, that rouge, the gypsy Prince; Vlad of the Jagged Spire. He entered with his cadre of gypsy girls in their striped corsets. Vlad wore his stylishly disheveled Victorian tails, and top hat. His dark hair curled around his shoulders, and the crisp click of his heels on the ceramic tile sent the crowd silent. Long had Zanzibar and Vlad been rivals, Zanzibar stealing Vlads gypsy ladies to his stage and Vlad temping Zanzibar’s lovers into his caravan.
Vlad swept through the silent crowd, holding the edges of his stain lined cape and mounted the stage with an effortless little hop.
“Long have we been rivals, Alpine Zanzibar, but tonight, that ends.†Vlad wrapped his arm around Zanzibar’s waist, pulling Zanzibars body towards his in a smooth, practiced motion. Vlad caught Zanzibar in a long and passionate kiss. When they finally parted, Vlad bowed to Zanzibar. “A decent rival happens once in a thousand lifetimes. My deepest thanks.â€
Zanzibar lifted the glass thrust into his hand, and proposed a toast to Vlad, and Vlad toasted Zanzibar, and into the night the patrons of the Silver Swan toasted each other and danced and laughed and sang away every hour.
Alpine Zanzibar took the key from around his neck, that brass key to the Silver Swan, and placed it around the neck of his lover, the doe eyed boy named Daniel, whose white shirt clung to his ribs like paint on a wall. Daniels eyes went liquid, he lost a crystal tear to Zanzibar’s thumb on his cheek and a kiss that was tender and sweet, a taste, an echo. But Zanzibar wouldn’t let his lover cry for long. He encouraged the band with a dramatic wave, let the drink pour from the fountains, and danced with the girls. Vlad whirled, skirts flew, and the organ played on.
After midnight, when everyone was drunk and singing, Zanzibar went to the back room and changed his clothes. He wiped the paint off his face and put on grey trousers and a flat, black cap. He picked up his satchel, the one with a change of clothes and his new identification cards, the ones that said Eugene Johnston, freshman university student in physics. He opened the back door into the alley and walked towards the public transport pod-station. Behind him, Alpine Zanzibar’s friends were toasting the life of a man they loved, ahead, Eugene Johnston started his life.
by J.R. Blackwell | Feb 26, 2006 | Story
Dear John,
I loved you John, I want you to understand that.
The Core wasn’t wrong to match us as marriage candidates; it just didn’t understand who you were really, the physical you. When we spoke and wrote and sent all those mad pictures over the Core – that was some other John. You used to write to me like a mad lover. You told me you would carry me though fire. You treated me like a partner, you told me you would always have my back, and that you could always trust me to have yours. I had compatibility with seventy-eight men over the Core, but none of them wrote like you, none of them sent the kind of beautiful pictures you did, or the songs you composed, or the mad videos you hacked together for me. No one was like you. That’s why I married you John, you were singular.
When we bought this house on the floating islands, I thought I was about to enter a dream. I was going to be living with the most amazing man on the pacific islands in a planned community. We dreamed up a thousand adventures for when we got here, do you remember?
I told myself a lot of excuses when we moved in together. You were adjusting, it was a new place, and it would take a while for you to find your feet. You were rude because you were nervous. The drugs were just your way of making yourself comfortable, the way you yelled was just your passion. You said you would carry me though hell, but you couldn’t love me enough to clean your clothes or rub my shoulders when I was tired.
After a while, I began to feel as if I had been tricked. I invented odd fantasies, that someone else had written those words, had sent those videos. I was being played on a trick, a terrible lie. Perhaps it was a program designed at seduction that you had bought; perhaps you bought me for the price of a cruel hack.
You asked me why I haven’t been bringing you meals, why I haven’t set the dials to clean the house, why I haven’t been talking to you. I thought you were a big liar, that I was wrapped in a lie, and I wanted you to suffer for what you have done. But that’s not the person I want to be. I don’t want to live as a bitter woman, angry about the life I keep choosing to trap myself in. I have to go away.
You are not the person I love, you are some strange, twisted imitator, some dreamer who dreams himself better than he is. You are so good at this that you fooled the Core, with all it’s wonderful psych tests and profiles. You fooled me too. You might even be fooling yourself.
I have to leave you. I cannot stay with the John who lives in that house; he is not the man that the Core matched me with.
When you become the man in those messages, find me.
-Tara
by J.R. Blackwell | Feb 21, 2006 | Story
It happened in a late night Karaoke bar on Mars. Neil had hit the high note on the Pop Remix of “Some Enchanted Evening†when he felt a white exultation, his feet lifting off the stage by a celestial breath, his eyes cracked open but unseeing. Then he fainted.
His friends took him to a doctor. They weren’t particularly worried; doctors could bring a person back from anything more than dust and Neil was still breathing. Neil was slight and pale from living underground, easy to carry into the doctor’s office.
The doctor looked at the light in Neil’s belly and told him the answer even before he did any tests. Neil had a baby star inside him. The doctor didn’t seem as surprised as Neil imagined he would be. He told Neil that people were made of ancient stardust; it was only logical that one could be born inside a person as much as in the depths of space. The doctor was very concerned. Too much longer and Neil’s organs would be consumed, already his liver was ash.
There was a cure.
The doctor took Neil to a place far underground, near the Mars core, to a room guarded by old-fashioned metal robots. There, in a sterile room, was a box, bound in black skin and iron rivets. It was a squatting, monstrous box that formed frost around it. Inside, the doctor told him, was a little black hole. The box itself was old, made by a race that had fallen into extinction far before the earth had even started to spin. It was made for eating stars.
Neil’s doctor could chain him to the wall and open the box, just a tad, just a crack, and the star would be sucked right out of him. His damaged organs could be replaced, but if he waited much longer, he would be dust. Neil put his hand on the box, his fingers stuck like magnets to the top. The cold chewed his skin like a mouth full of needles. The skin on his belly glowed with a peach light that pulsed rhythmically. The star was growing.
The hungry box waited.
Neil said he wanted to think about it, but the truth was he didn’t want to think at all; he just wanted to get out of that room, away from that box. The doctor warned him there wasn’t time, but Neil pushed out to the street, to the spaceport, where he maxed out his credit and bought a ship. By now, his fingertips were twinkling.
Neil pushed the ship out as far as he could, burning white from the inside. He inhaled toxic gases, spray-paint, glue, whatever he imaged stars ate. He lived in a pool of his own sweat, his skin as dry as sand. When he was deep in space he opened the hatch door and the cool sucking dark enveloped him. Neil opened his arms, a supernova sky.
by J.R. Blackwell | Feb 16, 2006 | Story
The man with black teeth ripped at her plastic environ-suit. Beth didn’t scream, it was a waste of energy and no one would hear her anyway.
He had no suit and his skin was bleached in some places, peeling and red in others. Sores covered his body and his hair was patchy on his head. Beth struggled to get out of his grip, but he pushed her down, and fumbled at the seals to her suit. He pulled down his pants and Beth saw he was bleeding there. She felt so tired. He ripped at her suit and she felt the hot, sour air invade. She screamed then, and the earth shook.
At first, Beth thought it was just in her head, that she was shaking, but then the tremor started again and the whole landscape shivered. The man looked away from her and Beth kicked up, right where he was bleeding, and he fell back, clutching himself. She scrambled upright and ran across the orange dirt, not looking back. The earth shook, and she fell and pulled herself up again, running. She ran farther than she ever had before, farther than her mother had ever let her go. She ran until she was lost and the midday heat was baking the earth until it shimmered.
Beth hid in a cave. She had gone out in the morning searching for metal, just like all the other children in the village. They came back empty handed, or with a few grams, tiny pieces. Once someone came back with an old soda can. Her mother would sell whatever she scrounged for food. Mostly it was never enough, and half the time, big kids stole from smaller children. No metal, no food, and her village had been running out of both for some time.
The man, an outlander, had told Beth that if she followed him, he would give her metal, and he led her to a place far outside of town. She had been there before, and it had been picked over already. She told him this, and he hit her. Beth cried to think about it. She felt like a stupid girl, a radiation baby, a dullard.
When the midday heat subsided, Beth knew she had to try to find a way home. She pulled out her scanner, the instrument that helped her find metal, in hope that the little map inside would help her find a way home. When she switched it on, it screeched, it’s little arrow waving wildly. There was metal close by! Beth ran out of the cave, following her reading. In the distance, there was a chasm in the earth, layers and layers of something she had only seen in pictures. A landfill, from the ancient days. She thought they had all been found and dug up, but maybe this one had stayed shielded by the layers on top of it.
Beth nearly choked. The earthquake must have opened it up. Layers of plastic and metal, dripping from the sides of the earth, revealed by the split in the earth. A treasure mine, more precious than gold.
