Writer's Block

by | Jan 25, 2006 | Story

“Space-faring monkies with a mirror fetish?”

“Yup. In The Day Ambrosia Paled by Kinstev Ramod, chapter six.”

“Damn. Okay, uhh… how about ice cream that turns your teeth green and carries a rare strand of the bubonic plague? Unleashed on a modern colony?”

“As a government experiment: Fire Warden by Jack Strapley. As a mad scientist’s coup de grace: On Being Trembleton by Emilia d’Oernga. With a time travel sub-plot: Terra Infirma by Marguerite Bloc. Sorry, Glenn. It’s all been done.”

Glenn groaned and leaned back in his chair, running his hand through the long part of his hair and pulling it out over his eyes, staring at the brown strands in frustration. “Damn it all! How am I supposed to write if there aren’t any original ideas?”

“Hey, come on, Glenn.” Neil grimaced at his friend in sympathy. “You’re just not thinking outside the box. Look, I know it’s tough, but there’s got to be something you can do that’s not already in here.” He gestured at the Central Database terminal he’d been using, the letters on the keyboard nearly worn off from the fruitless searches he’d made.

Neil’s words were encouraging, but his tone was not—it’d been months since Glenn had come up with his last viable story idea, and he still remembered the celebration they’d had. Now their fridge was bare, and there wasn’t a drop of alcohol in the house. Neil let out a long sigh. “Look… maybe you need a rest, yeah? Let’s go out for a while. We’ll go to the club, see Jeannie and the guys, and just relax. I bet it’d help. What do you say?”

Glenn made a noise of frustration and sat up straight again. “No. No! We’re almost out of cash. What good is going out going to do? That’ll just make things worse. I have to think of something, and fast!”

Neil sighed and turned back to the terminal. “Glenn, we’ve been at this for hours. You’re gonna make yourself sick.”

“No. No, I’ve got one.” Glenn turned sharply, his face lighting up as his eyes latched onto Neil. He paused dramatically. “How about… a guy with writer’s block trying to figure out what to put in a story?”

Neil groaned loudly and threw a stylus at Glenn. “Do I even have to answer? I think it’d break the database if I tried a search on that. Billions of billions of hits.”

Glenn chuckled. “Yeah, yeah, I know. Geez. I just wish that for once I could write something without caring that someone else already did it.”

“Wouldn’t sell.”

“Yeah, I know. I know.”

The two men stared in silence for a moment, Glenn at the ceiling, Neil at the screen that was nothing more than one massive search field.

“Neil?”

“Yeah?”

“How about a story about a writer who hacks into the Central Database and erases the old records so that editors will think his story is original?”

“You know,” Neil said with a slow grin, “I don’t think that one’s been done yet.”

Good Morning, Sunshine

by | Jan 24, 2006 | Story | 0 comments

After a while, you forget that it’s summer. Months and weeks become meaningless numbers on the monitor’s clock, and you don’t bother asking anyone what they are doing on the weekend. You know. They’re typing. You know.

You wait for the end of the shift and walk to the bar, seven blocks of August rain. “Beer,” you say, and the man obeys. Drops a pint on the table in front of you. You drum your fingers upon the wood, imagining text on the wall.

The beer is flat. The room is flat. They’ve left you hanging, like they always do.

Hours later, after you thought you’d fought it off, you surface in the lobby but the receptionist does not smirk. She’s used to this. You know she’s used to this.

“Overtime?” she says, and you nod. Overtime. Undertime. Time. They sit you down in the room lit only by the blue of a monitor, and you unfold into the refresh rate of the digital screen.

It seems like the document is typing itself, but in an accidental glance you see your hands floating over the keyboard. They seem to be plastic. You realize that it’s been days since you slept.

Your bell tolls eight hours and you push yourself up, forcing numb muscles to move to the door. You walk to the bar, seven blocks of August rain. “Beer,” you say, and the man obeys. Drops a pint on the table in front of you. You drum your fingers upon the wood, imagining text on the wall.

Object Of My Desire

by | Jan 23, 2006 | Story

Here in the Quiet Dark, a raygun can be your dearest friend. It warms to your touch, responds to your requests, and clears your way. It is the best partner one can expect to have in the Quiet Dark.

I’ve had Lizzette here for longer than most of my friends. Certainly longer than my living friends. It is not a weapon, it is not a tool. It is a partner, a friend. A lover.

That’s not queer, or nothing. But Lizzette’s saved my life far too often to be anything but a lover. And here in the Quiet Dark, love is a rare and flowered thing. You best find it where you can. Some of us up here, some claim to love their crate. But that’s a parasitic relationship, and any crate knows that, from the little cargo rockets to those faster-than-light frigates. They know who runs ’em to the scrap heap. No, me and Lizzette, here, we’re partners.

I tried giving her, up you know. Lizzette, the crate, the Quiet Dark, all of it. Settled down on a orb, found a woman who didn’t care when last I felt the sun and tried to live a life of noise and brightness.

I was warned. They all warned me, just like I’m warning you now. It never lasts. Not for us. Not after all the time in the Quiet Dark. I saw stars collide, you know? Watched a dark hole form and drag in the cosmos inside it. You think I could explain that to someone used to blue above? You think you’ll be able to?

The whole time, I wanted Lizzette there, at my hip. She’d been with me, she’d seen it all. But my girl didn’t want none of that. Proper men don’t carry guns, she said. But Lizzette wasn’t just a gun. She was my partner.

Don’t go thinking you’re any different. I can read a man’s scars as well as a veiwport. You’ve seen too much, same as me.

I suppose a fight between Lizzette and such a woman was destined to end only one way. I wish I had something to remember her by, like that necklace she always wore. But that went in the blast.

Probably just as well. I have Lizzette, after all. What more do I need, way out here?

Meanwhile, at Fox Headquarters…

by | Jan 20, 2006 | Story

“Can we say that on television?” Mool asked. He narrowed his eye at the monitor and raised a turquoise tentacle to his mouth as his other three appendages worked the digital controls.

“Mistep? Sure. It’s been clear for a decade.”

“But what about the Xedrin colony? We got an eight percent pull there last season.”

Nick pondered this for a second. He pushed his rolling chair away from the desk and slid over to the other tech. “If they’re going to bar us for mistep they’ll bar us for having a Relana, period. Leave it. It’s edgy.”

Mool sighed, a sound that hovered in the air for nearly thirty seconds due to his third lung. He dragged a tentacle over the trackpad and a scantily-clad blue female broke into pixels before reassembling at a different time signature.

“Molting season is just an excuse for her to turn down the environment,” the Relana complained as her overdue feathers bristled beneath the old ones. Her bare cheeks flushed to an irritated magenta. “’Oh, it’s so hot!’” she whined in a horrid approximation of a Terran accent. “Yeah, maybe on your ice planet, you frigid mistep.”

A tap to the panel, and her image froze. “Nice,” Nick said. “Do we have a retort clip?”

“We can skink one. Kelly was malko about the feathers in the sink last week.”

“Hmm.”

The cutting room filled with relative silence as the two techs pondered the next scene, Mool still sucking on his fourth tentacle and Nick gnawing on his thumbnail.

“Don’t we have a Penguinair ad?” he finally suggested. Mool’s skin tightened to inspired attention.

“A Texaco heating one, too!” he said, and his second tentacle yanked to the advert box. The clips were found almost immediately, and he slid the first cartridge into the control station. “We could run this pleb for centuries,” he said, as his mouth opened to a grin. “It’s like it never gets old.”

The Horsemen Of Carnaby Street

by | Jan 19, 2006 | Story

If you had asked Tyrone’s father why he kept horses, why he rode them with his three boys down Carnaby Street to South End and back, and why he never seemed to use a car, he would remove his Red Sox ballcap, run his hand over his coarse dreadlocks and proceeded to lecture you on the relative cost of equine upkeep versus the rising cost of gas per gallon. The crux of his argument was that expense is in the eye of the beholder, and a proper investment is worth a million shortcuts. Tyrone’s father was an economics professor; he lived for such questions.

Now that he was gone, Tyrone often wondered if his father knew something more than just relative costs and exact change. If those years of prospective financial reports had given him some sort of insight into the future. If he knew the Still would come. If he knew his boys would thread through the rusting hulks of abandoned cars and trucks, just as they had when there had been traffic.

“Is it ever gonna stop snowing?” Jamal, the youngest, asked.

“It’ll stop when you shut up for five minutes!” Curtis said, his horse and his body slouching behind.

Tyrone turned back to look at his younger brothers, unsure of what to tell them. He was enough of an adult to understand he should be grateful that the nuclear missile, detonating where it did, only spread the Still and the snow, and the worry of fallout had evaporated so quickly. That the electrics would work again one day, and the snow would stop. He was enough of an adult that he knew that.

But the parts of him that were still a child felt that three years was far too long a winter already, and Tyrone was afraid that he would live the rest of his life under snow and ice.

They were hauling this weeks supplies back from the Save-A-Lot down in South End. The store was shut down, but its immense parking lot had evolved into a type of barter market since the Still. Tyrone and his brothers were the only ones from Carnaby Street who could make it all the way down to South End, so they often loaded up their mounts with neighbors’ pots and knives and clocks with gears, to trade for canned vegetables and freshly caught pigeons.

“Catch up now, you morons,” Tyrone called back to his brothers. “Let’s not be out longer than we have to. Not good for the horses.” Not good for us, either, Tyrone thought. The weather was harsh that day and had forced them to take the Martin Luther King Highway. The MLK’s lack of surrounding buildings made them sitting ducks for any gang that wanted to pick them clean. The stunted trees that lined the MLK would not be enough cover for Tyrone’s brothers and horses–much less the haul–but an abandoned SUV could hide damn near a dozen highwaymen before they chose to strike.

“You spooked of the highwaymen, Ty?” Curtis called out, far too loud for caution. “You scared of the boogeyman, too?” He and Jamal laughed, an echoing bray that bounced off the icy metal and glass.

“P’raps hes gotta r’son to be skeered,” came a voice from behind a car. Tyrone cursed his luck and his brothers’ laughter, as a mess of ragged men and women slithered out from around the rusting vehicles. All carried the crude, haphazardly fashioned knives indicative of the highway-folk. Tyrone had heard that of some of the gangs uptown carried guns, but he doubted they used them much. Bullets were far too expensive to replace.

Keeping that notion in mind, Tyrone pulled out his own pistol and aimed it at the closest would-be robber. He tried very hard to keep it from shaking.

“Do you like my hat?” Tyrone asked the highwayman, staring down the barrel. “No? Not a Red Sox fan? I’m not much of one either, though my father was. Despite their losing streak. He was always so sure they would win the World Series one more time. Went to all their games, Dad did. As an investment, he called it. Though my mother always claimed it was more effort than they were worth.”

Tyrone had the entire gang’s attention now, if drawing the gun didn’t get it before. He cocked back the hammer with his thumb, surprised at how easy it was. “Some would argue that placing a bullet in your brainpan would be more effort than you’re worth. But I’m willing to look at it as an investment.”

“Y’gonna get’sall, horseman?,” the highwayman said through rotting teeth. His posture was strong, but his eyes weren’t. They worried back and forth.

“Curtis, how many are there?” Tyrone called out, not moving his eyes one bit.

“7…no, 2 more behind that truck.”

“Looks like I am,” Tyrone said. “Might even shoot you again when it’s all over. Unless you and yours decide to leave us alone, and then I get to save this clip for another day.”

“Can’t letcha guh. Not for free.”

“Fair enough,” Tyrone said, and shot the man right between the eyes.

Tyrone said his brothers’ names and reined his horse up, and the ragged gang scattered from beneath the powerful brown steed’s hooves. The three horsemen galloped back to Carnaby Street, full load in tow, aware that their “investment” would only last so long.

Tyrone’s father had always said that expense is in the eye of the beholder. When Tyrone caught the way his brothers now looked at him, he felt he understood. The adult in him figured that the expense was not too high, that their coldness would past, and the fear in Jamal’s eyes would one day leave. But he was still enough of a child to know it would be far too long before it did.

Tyrone wondered if it was enough to be able to walk down a path, even if the snow made it impossible to know where you were going.