100

Some of these went out on postcards; others as electronic shout-outs to friends on LiveJournal. Then there are a few of which I didn't keep a copy; I like the idea that they're out there as unique artifacts that I cannot reproduce. Here are the rest, for your entertainment.

p.s. I got this idea from Gaiman's "Nicholas Was...", although I didn't count the titles of mine toward the word limit.

Spectacles...
(for Jeff Spicer)

“… are not to be ignored,” she said. We stood on a wall that bent until it enclosed everything worth seeing.

“The gaudy, the fantastic, the in poor taste: only an idiot would walk by, blithely secure in his austerities. Ours is a world of shit! One must feast before one can defecate.”

An audience had gathered below us to hear our debate, and they made me hesitate. To try..? To hold up what light..? Or to damn everything with impenetrable obfuscations?

I glanced at what lay outside the wall. “Nothing is ever quite true,” I told them.


Nero, Octavian, Caligula, et cetera
(for Sean Landers)

I have witnessed the blades of butchers, and stand unmoved by their heavy deeds.

I have walked the paths first pressed into shape by the iron heels of empire. My shoes added some little pressure of their own.

I have confronted monuments, towers, obelisks; the steeds and the clubs and the honorifics of a war stretching back in an unbroken line to before when they write the books about.

Nothing gets through. These blank centuries do not trouble me. I can learn about this later, from my screen. In a way I can appreciate. When the technology has been perfected.


The Book of the Dead...
(for James Kobialka)

… is never the same twice. This is only a great irony if you are a fool. It can be written in up to six languages, illustrated, subdivided into a near-infinite diversity of chapters with caesuras, voltas, interjections, commentaries and inscrutable aporia. It can be rearranged, redacted. You may even try to find yourself inside it, editing a unique version singularly suited.

But it must always be written. It must never stop. Somewhere, someone must always inscribe it. Add to it, copy it down, enclose it in quotations. Only do not cease.

When it ceases to be written, we die.


Silent places...
(for S. Randolph Mills)

... were his workshops. They were tiny, sometimes: the gap between two bricks in an old wall, a hollow under an adventurous vine, the forgotten corners of rooms too large. His toil (and its fruits): quotidian.

But each day held moments, after the paying customers had left, when all the ancient streets were open to him. He reinvented history, labored at wonders, kept gods older than stone alive with extemporaneous litanies. The city on the mountain had known many owners; he was nothing so crude.

It was just the nightmares of imprisonment and torture that made him glance sometimes road-ward.


(untitled)
(for Nicole McConvery)

There was a bridge. It doesn't matter where. It crossed a river as wide and sluggish as the plutocrats who'd paid for its construction. It wasn't a bridge for crossing. It was where they'd decided to keep all of their most precious things. If it was over the water, they'd reasoned, it couldn't be under it; if it was between the two halves of the city, it couldn't be in either. Their various workers and functionaries eventually noticed this and began saying, “Safe as bridges.” They built bridges of their own and lived on them. Meanwhile, the city crumbled.


War memorials...
(for Jubal Slone)

… never stay blank. Their surfaces are palimpsests of rust and graffiti. The colors blend. The messages fade together. When you approach, you hear:

“Francesco I love you bravely fallen fuck the left behind never on the fields of Gloria I love you freedom freely isn't given give me a world people united states fuck you I love you give me a war I hate I love I fade the ages angels God has taken God I love you God give me a world without war our brave young boys I love eternal rest above below give me everything.”


When the meteorologists went on strike...
(for Brian Baker)

... everyone in the world burst out laughing in what could accurately be described as uncanny unison. Unkind jokes in endless profusion expressed one sentiment: "We didn't know what it would do when you WERE working, so enjoy your little break!"

It was only when the first wave of mass suicide hit the news that we stopped our chortles. Alert journalists read their final predictions; several succumbed to schizophrenia afterward. And while we tried to warm ourselves with remorse, seek shelter under it, shade our eyes against the glare of the pitiless, baleful sky with it, eternal winter covered the world.


(untitled)
(for Maria)

"I care nothing for oracles!" she bellows, unsolicited. "Fate is the excuse of the weak, whose appetites are as feeble as their palsied limbs!" I always was a sucker for girls who talked like that.

While she isn't watching, I draw the four draughts. Cast yarrow stalks. Toss bones. To say nothing of my recurring prophetic dreams (which technically aren't my responsibility). Rather than write them down, where someday she might find them, I reveal the results only in casual remarks, cloaked in metaphor. She isn't listening, anyway.

"I will devour this world!" she screams. And insists I stop smiling.


We have tilled this earth...
(for G. Myers Gilmer)

“...since God was a nameless infant,” they told me. I remain skeptical to this day but, at the time, said nothing. “Empires have come and gone. Religions fallen. Still the work of our hands feeds the armies of distant potentates. We care not. Our walls stand impregnable.”

I said thanks for letting me stay, and left it at that. I was only in town for a night, on my way to meet a girl in the shining city in the foothills. I ate their food and walked away, unchanged. I tell myself this nightly, or I can't sleep.

fiction

I've decided this is as good a place as any to serve as a central location for some not-so-great-yet-still-interesting short works. For every time I've started a story and left it undone, every fiction contest I've not quite entered, every ill-conceived notion that almost saw a reader's eye, there must be an answer. It shall be here.

To begin: last summer before I left for that trip to Europe, I heard about a writing contest on NPR. I had a couple days at most before the deadline. I began a story; I lost interest, presumably, or simply failed to get it done in time. In any case I wrote what is now a lost chunk of micro-fiction and haven't done anything with it since. If memory serves, there was a 500 word limit and the following prompt: the first sentence must be, "The nurse left at five o'clock." The title below is the best I can come up with at the moment.


Memory (working title)

The nurse left at five o'clock. She entered the subway station at Charles Street nineteen minutes later and waited another ten minutes for an inbound train. She boarded it, sat by herself and began to murmur quietly, not rocking back and forth, not sitting bolt upright, not staring or sweating or showing any other immediately visible sign of distress. At 6:03 a.m. her train crashed into another Red Line train waiting to enter the track at Park Street and at 6:04 a.m. she emerged from the wreckage clutching her left arm to her side, pushed her way through the crowd and walked up the stairs without a word. This much we know. What we do not know - what I cannot stop dreaming of her until I know - is why. My name is Marcus Andrews and I am from the future.

Five people were killed instantly by the initial impact; another seventeen were wounded. Witnesses called the EMS immediately and the first medical personnel arrived on the scene in under four minutes. During that time, three injured passengers succumbed to their wounds and died. Above them, a fully qualified RN named Annie Gilbrading held her left arm against her side and walked away.

I would like to tell you that this event is of crucial significance - that I traveled back in time to save the life of a man who would have cured a disease, or to save a nurse's soul - but I am shirking my responsibilities by being here, studying these events. They matter solely to me and I do not know why they compel me. I have a husband, a daughter. My career is meaningful. Still I dream of her soft, blank face and find her beautiful. Still, she lets them die.

Strict rules govern time travel: a cap on number of years from the point of projection, a limit on the duration of each trip. No physical manifestation is allowed. If you discover certain facts pertaining to your own life or origin, they may be confiscated on your return. The authorities may enter and search your mind without a warrant if your trip is deemed a threat to national security, and you can be called to account for actions taken outside your native timestream.

I push them. Settle myself on her like a cloak, mimic her experience of the cold, the drip from the wound. and as glances or stares or earnest inquiries come in I press my lips tight and breathe. She says nothing. Walks toward something on a horizon no one else could see and I am behind her, beside her. If they discover these thoughts I will be punished, no doubt, but I have no answer for them.