by Jared Axelrod | Dec 22, 2005 | Story
Hongping watched a small child flounce across the glacier floor. The furry grey snowsuit the child was sealed into kept it from going faster than a clumsy amble, but it didn’t seem to mind. It was charging toward a huddle of summarily swaddled children. Waving its arms like that, the handless sleeves of the snowsuit made it look like some half-formed bird about to take flight.
Hongping smiled sadly deep within the voluminous black cloak that signified his adulthood. He had not been wearing it long, and was still unused to its weight. He had been so excited to cast off his fuzzy grey clothes and don the white and the black. Now he felt buried in the thick material.
When he had put on the cloak for the first time, Hongping’s father had handed him the sword of their family, saying that it was a symbol of the old days, and that it would protect his family. Hongping had believed that to be true, then. Now he saw the sword as little more than a heavy piece of ceremonial metal.
Watching the children play their huddle-game, Hongping wondered if his son would have charged so, or if he would have cautiously approached the huddle, like some of the other children. Hongping thought about pretending one of them was his boy-faces obscured by the snowsuits and goggles, the children all looked alike. But their laughs and cries were alien. None of them sounded like his boy, not one.
Just as well. Hongping remembered how distraught Alice had been, driven so mad by their shared loss that she pretended another’s baby was their own. She had been beaten by the other mothers; slapped raw by mittened hands. Hongping was scrounging in what was left of the city when it happened. He returned just in time to find her sprawled on the ice, her tears searing away the frost that clung to her bare face.
She told him not to leave. It was Alice who had been in the ruins when their son had gotten sick, and now it was forever a place of poison in her mind. The last time Hongping had seen her, she was walking away from the tribe, in a direction opposite of the city. She needed more distance, she had said, and begged Hongping to come with her.
Hongping stared at the children and their play, and felt the deep weight buried in the center of his chest intensify its ache. He found himself wondering whether he should have wandered off with Alice, whether it was better to bury this ache on the other side of the glacier instead of bearing it here within the warmth of the tribe. He wondered how long he would have to walk before the ice crystallized inside his lungs like it had his son’s.
He was staring straight at it, but it wasn’t until the large predatory bird screeched that Hongping realized it for what it was. He was horrified at its presence, but that fear was replaced by cold dread when he realized that he was not the bird’s target.
The children were.
Hongping wasted no time closing the distance between himself and winged terror, his black cloak billowing behind him. Hongping withdrew his sword without even realizing he was doing it, his body now a puppet of adrenaline and purpose. The bird had already gathered up three small bodies in its massive talons, and was reaching for a fourth when Hongping’s ancient steel dug deep into its thigh. The raptor’s screech echoed painfully off the ice. It dropped the children, choosing instead to bury those gargantuan talons into Hongping’s shoulder. As the bird’s jagged beak thrust itself toward its attacker’s face, Hongping summoned the last of his strength and shoved his sword up underneath the bird’s head.
The giant bird kept twitching long after the sword’s point burst through the crown of its head.
Hongping’s shoulder was attended to by Musette, who had recently lost her husband to water beyond the glacier. She removed his cloaks and undergarments, keeping him warm within the folds of her own black clothing. Their bodies close, Musette set to the art of healing Hongping wounds.
“You know,” she said. “You’d make a wonderful father.”
by Jared Axelrod | Dec 18, 2005 | Story |
“Half-man, half-dinosaur!” A voice-over perfectly matched with the combination of human and tyrannosaurus genes that hovered above Zyi Izaiah Eizenberg’s holo snapped him awake. “The perfect candidate! He literally devours his opponents! Kennedy Rex wants what you want, and is not afraid to use his 4-foot long bone crushing jaws to get it!”
“You can’t believe the news today,” Zyi thought to himself, rubbing what sleep remained out of his eyes. “No one will ever take a Galactic Prime Minister seriously with those tiny little arms.” Then again, Zyi had heard that those diminutive appendages were apparently used for titillation during sex. The old boy may have shot in politics after all, depending on how quick his reflexes are.
Zyi smoothed out his old flight jacket so it looked less like he slept in it and strapped his goggles on. He had the holo set for a continual search on Kennedy Rex for purely research purposes; Zyi hadn’t counted on the man-lizard’s career being so boring that he’d fall asleep watching. Such was the inherent benefit and problem with having your political leaders grown from a lab: they had no real time to fuck up their careers. Not that it made Zyi’s job any harder, just more dull.
Zyi dialed his goggles for maximum visual pollution filter, blanking out pop-up displays and the sidewalk- and wall-embedded screens, leaving his only distractions the people in front of him and the cars on the street. Zyi had heard that the new implants don’t let you blank out that much, on the grounds that blanking out that much of the world made you unable to cope with the world around you. Which is why Zyi preferred his antique goggles. He liked to cope with the world as little as possible.
Boring as he was, Kennedy Rex was easy to find. When a six-hundred pound Prime Minister Candidate gave a press conference, there were only so many places it could happen. And a football stadium was out of the question. Not when the season had just started. The fans were already too used to the sense of blood, and, having camped out in the stadium for the duration of the season, they were eager for fresh meat. No, it would have to be outdoors. So Zyi took the mono to Fu Manchu Park, his goggles filtering out just about everything that would remind him of the era he was living in.
“See the Lizard King! Alive, alive, alive! ” Kennedy Rex’s press secretary was working up a good crowd. Early in her career she had speakers implanted in her chest, and those vocal mammories spewed forth sound bites in mesmerizing staccato. “Bear witness, folks, to the man, the monster, the future Prime Minister of the Galactic State! Forget what you think you know! Believe your eyes and your ears as this man, this monster takes your needs to heart! Truly, he is a symbol of the very times we live in!”
Kennedy made a benign gesture with his miniscule arms, but Zyi saw a look he recognized in the candidate’s eyes. A look of a predator, the look of hunger. Zyi had seen it enough on his own face.
Zyi closed his eyes and tried to recall the dream he always had, over and over, of a world he remembered but didn’t see anymore. He was pretty sure there were no mutant carnivorous reptile government leaders, but he wasn’t positive. The only thing he knew for sure was the job.
“I’ve got a question for the candidate!” Zyi shouted. “Do you know the times?”
Fire, holy vengeance, atomic blast, indignation. All these and several more erupted from Zyi’s raygun, leaving nothing more than a burned torso with emaciated arms and a cumbersome tail where the Possible Future Prime Minister once roared. Security was unsurprisingly useless, considering the might of the candidate. He was a part dinosaur, after all.
With the air thick with bar-be-qued lizard and the ozone of flash bulbs, Zyi removed his goggles and let the chaos flow over him.
Another job well done.
by Jared Axelrod | Dec 12, 2005 | Story
Jesse McVeigh had lived long enough to remember a time before the wall was erected, way back before the seawall was necessary to keep back the waters of the Sea of Tranquility from encroaching on the borders of the city of Artemis. Old Jesse McVeigh will tell you about those days, if you ask him. He’ll do it if you don’t, too.
Jesse sits on a rocking chair on the porch of the Armstrong Inn, where his son is the proprietor. Sometimes he’ll sit with the old man, but more often than not he can’t spare the time. He’s heard all of the stories, anyway, he’ll say. Jesse McVeigh, like the moon, has no new stories.
Some stories are too old, even for Jesse. Ask about his life on Earth, for example, and Jesse McVeigh will rub the sleeve that covers the barcode tattooed on his right arm and change the subject.
Jesse McVeigh’s granddaughter, who happens to share his name, dreams of space and visiting Earth. Her father gave her a telescope, and she shows her grandfather the barren fields and jagged canyons of the old planet through the lenses, proudly reciting the names of each one. But old Jesse McVeigh only sees the trenches in which he and his brother hid from the iron colossuses. And he sees the grave of his brother, which he was forced to leave unmarked. Jesse McVeigh smiles and acts impressed with his granddaughter’s memory, but he does not look at Earth for very long.
Sometimes friends of Jesse McVeigh will sit with him. They will not talk about their barcodes, or who they were before the moon. They will talk about the chill in the air off the Sea of Tranquility, how the fish and crab harvest will be affected. They will talk of the hotel business, of recipes for beef stew and jing char siu bau and doro alicha, of pains in new places. They will talk about when Artemis was smaller, of sons and daughters and grandchildren, of the possibilities of moving to warmer New Houston. These topics are as old as the wall itself.
Once once in awhile, a young person will bring up terra-forming Earth back to how it was before the war. That the moon cannot continue to hold the human race, that they were running out of room as it was. That going back to Earth is rapidly becoming the only option. And Jesse McVeigh and his friends will scoff. But they know the truth, that the wall on the edge of the Sea of Tranquility exists to keep the city from drowning the water just as much as it keeps the water from drowning the city. That someday, there will not be enough room. The walls will not be enough.
Jesse McVeigh will not be among those that return. He will stay on the moon, stare into its blue sky, and try very hard to put the Earth behind him.
by Jared Axelrod | Dec 7, 2005 | Story
“There’s an element of theatre to all this, ain’t there?” the sheriff said. Malachai Singh was a gruff man, but a fair sheriff, and Sister Britney took this into account when she spoke to him.
“Jeddeloh is our home. We’re here to assess the damage, get some closure.” She motioned behind her to the hundreds of people bottle-necking through the checkpoint. “For we have sworn we shall return to our homes on this day no matter who or what shall–”
“Save the speeches for the cameras, Sister.” Sheriff Singh pushed the brim of his hat back and squinted in the glare of the twin suns. “I got eyes. More’n two-thirds of these folks have been back here already. This here is grandstanding.”
Sister Britney brought herself up to her full five feet, wimple bristling. “I will not have you belittle our impassioned and brave re-entry into this disaster area that was once our home!”
Sheriff Singh slowly sat down in the dirt, his back toward the two suns and sluggish crowd under them. Directly ahead of him, miles off, lay the massive crater the locals had taken to calling “Judgment.”
“You ever been in dust storm, Sister? Me neither, ’till me and my boys got caught in the one that meteorite kicked up. It’s like a swarm of insects, ‘cept smaller and bigger all at once. And you’re swimming in that, that and ruins from the impact of the blast. Nothing’s solid, you know? Everything falls apart easy in a storm like that.
“I had a boy on my force, shot himself in the head. Right in front of his co-workers, he did. Like the job wasn’t hard enough on them already.
“You left, Sister. You and those who could, you left. I ain’t gonna preach to a woman of the cloth, but you aught to choose your words better next time you open that mouth God gave you. I’ll give you impassioned. But this ain’t bravery. The ground’s too clean.”
Sister Britney placed her hand on Singh’s shoulder. She searched for something to say, half-remembering a sermon she had given for a televised benefit some years back, on the rewards of hardship. But it all vanished from her mind when Sheriff Singh grabbed her hand and held it tight. Sister Britney looked back at what remained of the city she had once called home, and then turned to take in the devastation that small rock from space had caused upon what had once been pristine farmland. The lack of contrast forced her silent.
The suns were still low in the sky, as the two of them stared at the crater, one on the ground and the other seemingly using the first for support. The air had a distinct chill to it, and the shadows ahead of Sister Britney and Sheriff Singh were long and lean.
by Jared Axelrod | Dec 1, 2005 | Story
The first day we met, I described myself as a reader, but she never called herself a writer. Instead, she would always say she “had written†and would pull down her collar or roll up her sleeves and show people. They would catch a paragraph or two as it ticked across her chest or revolved around her forearm. Her hands and face remained un-marked; every other body part was fair game, parchment awaiting ink. The scrolling tattoo was connected to an implant in her skull, allowing her to add and edit as she saw fit. Her novel was about a girl with a scrolling tattoo of a novel about herself, her life and loves; it wasn’t the deepest subject matter, but she had a brilliant turn of phrase.
I flatter myself that I read more of it than anyone. This probably has less to do with her willingness to be gazed upon while naked, than it has to do with my being a compulsive reader. I was very easily distracted when we had sex, for example. But having a girl who not only had written, but also was a book (a book!) was too good to pass up.
That was, until, he showed up. She called him the “The Reader,” and he was an obnoxious new character in the world that was scrawled around her body. The Reader arrived innocuously enough. We were watching TV—or rather, she was watching TV. I was reading the words that poked out of her exposed middriff. And there he was, circling lasciviously around her belly button. A man, close to my description, introduced himself to the main character of her novel as “a reader.”
“Is this supposed to be me?”
“Who?” she said, straightening up and pulling her shirt down. “Is who supposed to be you?”
“You know who I’m talking about,” I said. “The Reader.” She feigned innocence and crossed her legs in such a way that her right leg stuck out from below her skirt. Marching along her calf was a part I hadn’t read yet. I let the matter drop.
But The Reader showed up again. And again. It started to get unsettling. It wasn’t so much what he did, it was that he didn’t do anything. All he did was read the novel on the main character’s body, a passive presence in her life. It was disturbing.
“Is this how you see me?” I asked, several times. There may have been a few times when I said this that were perhaps louder than necessary.
“You’re reading too much into it,” was always her answer.
When The Reader accused the main character of writing about him, I about near lost it. I held up her own arm as proof as it circled by, but she merely shrugged it off. When The Reader started yelling at the main character, and forcing her behind closed doors, crying tears he would never see, I knew our relationship was over. The Reader had ruined it.
I let her keep the television.
I saw her again, a few weeks later. She smiled at me, and we acted as old friends. But then The Reader showed up again, as brief description of what had happened to him since slowly crawled across her cleavage. Apparently, he had contracted prostate cancer, Asian bird flu and some sort of flesh-eating virus, as well as now taking it Thai Lady-Boy style from an ex-con named “Bubba.”
We don’t talk much anymore.
