Dive

November 27, 2008 at 4:55 pm (short stories) (, )

“It’s in the water!”

It took her a good five seconds to process that. Then, reality came crashing in between the sound of a hut collapsing under the weight of fire and the screams of the people around her.

They had finished Janon’s research.

It was in the water.

Of course. The irony would have been enough to choke her, if the smoke hadn’t already been doing such a good job of it.

Janon had been right after all.

Still, she didn’t hesitate–there was no time. “You heard him!” she cried to those around her. “Get in the river! Go!” None who heard her paused to question; it was an obedience that she’d learned to expect, if not understand. The pull of command in her voice was apparently sufficient enough to drive the others on without need of explanation, even now as she asked the impossible of them.

Twenty generations of suspicion, a pathological fear of that brooding water, all torn away by one commanding girl and an even greater fear of the disease that plagued the village behind them. Perhaps, after the horror of seeing your loved ones burst into flame, an old wives’ tale about a poisonous river just didn’t seem so worrying.

She saw the first group reach the bank, many diving in without hesitation, completely submerging themselves in the saving moisture, the protective coating that would save them from the fate so many of their friends and family had already suffered. Traditions being swept away, stripped and cleansed, with an ease her father never would have believed.

Their people had paid a heavy price for this renewal.

Still, even from this distance, she could see some holding back. She resisted the urge to scream at them, knowing that it would do no good, even as their distant figures began to smoke. Long past shock, she felt a vague sense of nausea as she turned away to shepherd the last of her people away from their burning homes and towards the dark length of water now churning below them.

As the last man passed her, the small child in his arms emitting smoke, she paused and looked back at the ruins of their home, their village, now the victim of twenty generations of moronic superstition.

If only they’d listened to Janon. If only she had. But now he was dead, just hours before his research discovered the cure to this…this plague of fire. Janon had known the river was a harbor, not an enemy. He had paid a heavy price for her disbelief.

It was only then that she remembered Janon’s son. No one else would have thought to retrieve him, orphan that he was. She spared a glance back towards the river, just long enough to see some of the men who had already submerged charging back up the hill towards her, prepared to save what they could.

She took a deep breath, choked on the stench of burning hair and wood, and then made her way into the flames. She heard the shouts behind her, and ignored them.

This, at least, she could do. She owed Janon that much. Besides, her father would have expected no less of her.

She found the boy in one of the last untouched huts, all the way to the back of the village, nearly halfway up the steep hillside that climaxed in the rushing tumble of the falls that fed the river. His crying was so loud that she could hear it over the cacophony of pounding water and roaring flame. She scooped him up and offered one soothing noise, knowing it would do little good. His skin was already steaming, the first sign of the plague. He had to get to the river.

She was forced to halt near the middle of town, separated from the group of men just coming in by one of the beams of the council hall, which now lay burning across the center of the road. Her eyes teared up from the smoke, her ears ringing from the child’s cries. He didn’t have much longer.

With a strength born of desperation, she flung him—over the flames, and into the startled arms of the nearest man on the other side. She heard their cries for her to jump and waved them off, directing them with sign language to get the boy to water.

With no other options left to her, she turned and ran the opposite way. Towards Janon’s hut, now being consumed by flame. Towards the falls. She hoped the boy was safe.

The crashing sound of water filled her ears, overpowering even the crackling of the flames behind her. Still, she ran, fearing being caught by the ever-quickening inferno building in the village. Having now demolished the huts, it devoured the foliage, climbing up the slope practically at her heels.

At last she could run no farther. She stumbled to a stop at the rocky pinnacle of the hill, the falls so close and so loud that the rest of the world faded away. She shivered helplessly, drenched to the skin from the water in the air. It was impossibly high up. For the first time in months, she could clearly see the stars, unobstructed by the curtain of smoke.

She walked to the edge and looked down, and down, and down. The mighty river seemed very far away. Her people were indistinguishable in the night, small dots on the bank that she could only see if she squinted.

She felt heat at her back and turned, startled to find the fire blazing, a raging inferno that hurt her eyes, licking at the tiny island of rock that she had claimed as sanctuary.

With a kind of incredulity, she realized that there was only one remaining option.

She stepped to the edge, feeling tiny and lost next to the timeless, massive falls. Salvation was far, far below her in the night.

It was in the water.

Her mouth twitched into a smile. Janon would have appreciated this moment. He’d always said that she needed to take a leap of faith.

With a last glance up at the stars, where she hoped her father was, she allowed herself to feel contentment. Her people were safe. She had done her duty.

Eyes wide open, she jumped into oblivion, and knew something that might have been joy as she began to fall down, down, down, to the waiting river.

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Green

November 13, 2008 at 5:23 pm (definitions)

Green: (grēne), adj:

Rolling pastures and lush imagry. A deep secluded pool, dappled with sun and shadow. The bright scent of freshly mowed summer; a garden, cool and elegant, with roses peeking out. A perfect leaf, glossy and smooth, dotted with globes of morning dew. Dark moss, vibrant and alive against the old gray of a dead tombstone. Venerated ivy; a gradual climb up walls made of sun-warmed stone and knowledge. The iris of an eye, reflecting in the sun to shades of brown, blue, grey. A forest tinted almost blue in the twilight of a cold fall day. The texture of a crisp dollar bill; in turn, the filth of over-used currency. A visible sign of decay and mold, both in the world and the spirit. Shade of envy, greed, witches. Naturally complimenting to the heavens and symbiotic to the earth. Varied in its uses by God and man; above all, inevitably sincere.

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Of Desk Lamps and Humanity

November 8, 2008 at 5:48 pm (short stories) (, )

Death watches.

This is something that not many people realize, for reasons not entirely clear to him. After all, how else do people think he always manages to get there just in time for the end of each life? It takes careful observation (and an admittedly skilled sense of timing) that can only be achieved by him, because he is Death, and this is how it should be.

But then, the human thought process has never made much sense to Death. None at all, really, and that seems to be a problem, because he has found (to his own surprise, if he were capable of it), that humanity is rubbing off on him whether he understands it or not.

Death is curious. And so, he decides to indulge in another human tendency: experimentation.

Thus, Archa is created.

Archa is a world in micro, and because Death likes to think that he might somehow have a sense of humor, it is contained in a glass cube about the size of a paper weight. There are exactly thirty-three inhabitants (eleven adult males, eleven adult females, five each of male and female children, and one cat), divided between three tiny little towns that hang suspended in the middle of the space.

For expediency’s sake, Death designs each Archan to accept this state of affairs unquestioningly. He also adds hanging staircases that connect each village, and for some reason this pleases him.

He begins to suspect that he might have a sense of aesthetics.

Yet he is also practical, and so Death designs his small world experiment to be self-sustaining. Then he realizes that any world that mirrors the one humans live in must be kept intact by something outside itself, and so he creates in Archa the need for light.

He finds that micro humans that take energy from light alone are much more easy to manage than the real things, that require food and liquids and rest.

It only then occurs to Death that in order to keep this tiny world alive (and he suddenly finds that he does indeed wish for these tiny oblivious inhabitants to survive, which is incredibly paradoxal), he will need a source of light.

So, in a fit of something that a human might have called whimsy, Death creates a desk lamp, and places Archa under it. He once again feels an odd kind of pleasure (is this satisfaction?) at the colors that emerge as the light refracts through the glass, causing a rainbow on all six sides.

He then thinks that perhaps, it would be pleasant to spend long hours in thought over this tiny world of his own making, and suddenly decides to do something completely irrational and unnecessary, even though it suddenly feels as if it is the only right thing to do.

In the nothingness of his non-world, Death creates a desk.

With careful motions, he places the desk lamp and the tiny glass world of Archa on its gleaming wood surface.

In the long hours of non-time he exists in, Death rests his head in his hand, and watches. Perhaps, he thinks, this is something of what it means to be human.

He is more right than he knows.

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Odds

November 7, 2008 at 3:10 pm (story exerpts) (, )

Elim’s entire life had been ruled by one small, simple, utterly true statement of percentage. It went something like this: There were twelve Almarians in existence, there were twelve known inhabited galaxies, and the sheer mass of sentient beings made the chance of two members of his rare race meeting just under .0000000000000000003%. Actually, the exact number was a bit longer than that, but frankly, another five or six digits just weren’t very important in a number that small.

The thing was, no one knew exactly why there were only twelve Almarians (the history books merely cited different theories, including a bounty hunter and a plague) when there had once reportedly been an entire planet of them. That had been cycles upon cycles ago, so long that no one living could remember it any more. It was one of the greatest mysteries of the twelve galaxies. Even more of a mystery was why no one knew exactly where the remaining twelve Almarians were located, or who they were at all.

But in the grand scheme of things, Elim found it didn’t matter. His adopted parents never treated him any differently than their own biological children and all in all, the young Almarian grew up relatively normally. The only odd thing that ever happened to Elim (besides his eyes changing color every time he had a mood swing, that is) was when he got a message two weeks before his coming-of-age celebration to inform him that he did not need to register in his planet’s citizen database. Apparently, someone somewhere knew who and what he was, and that was enough to put him in the inter-galaxy database. His inquiry was never returned.

Elim’s life was ruled by science and fact. He graduated as the head of his class and went on to excel at neurological reality programming because it was the only career challenging enough to keep him interested for more than a week. Numbers and systems were easy for him. His parents had raised him to see the world for what it was, to understand the equation that made a situation go one way or another. Words like faith and fate and luck were abstracts to Elim, and he was more than happy to keep it that way.

So when he looked up from his normal place in his favorite café just a block down from his house and saw a woman with blue hair and green eyes come in, his neatly structured, comfortably managed world of numbers came screeching to a halt.

So did Ano; she stopped dead in the doorway and made the elderly couple behind her run into her. She didn’t notice. Her eyes were on Elim’s and he found himself wishing he knew what color they were turning, because he had a feeling it was probably embarrassing.

Before he could even figure out what to do with the situation (they’d never taught him how to actually handle reality in school, only to manipulate it), Ano was sitting across from him at the table and holding her hand out, silver rings glittering on her fingers. The thought that this was some kind of elaborate practical joke only flashed through his mind once. Then their hands met, Ano smiled and Elim knew that this was real, and that he’d just beaten the .0000000000000000003% by accident without going farther than two blocks from his house.

“I’m here to interview someone for a position,” Ano said by way of introduction. “But I suddenly find I don’t care.”

She had his accent. Elim was smiling so big it hurt, but he couldn’t seem to stop. “Unless you need a neurological reality programming expert, I’m afraid I can’t be much help.” It was a stupid conversation to have at a moment this big, but it worked for them.

Ano stared at him for a long moment and then burst out laughing. By the time she got done explaining that a neurological programming expert was exactly what she was looking for, Elim was laughing too.

The young Almarian had never done an impulsive thing in his life. But suddenly he wasn’t alone—he wasn’t alone—and that made life different. He took the job, moved out of his parents’ house and got on the next transport out to the Milky Way with her before he even thought to ask her name.

“Ano,” she said easily, swaying with the transport’s takeoff velocity.

“Elim,” he replied. And that was that.

They never talked about it: never discussed how they were a sixth of their entire race, how the chances of a male and a female with complementing skill sets finding each other were so impossible.

All Elim knew about Ano was that she and he were bound by something deeper than mere common interest or ideals. If their meeting wasn’t fate…well, it was an awfully small percentage of probability.

It was really inevitable, then, that he would fall in love with her sooner or later. He took some comfort in that.

He still remembered that first transport ride with crystal clarity. “Where are we going?” he’d finally thought to ask.

“Paradise,” she responded with a twinkle in her eyes.

Somewhere deep inside of him, Elim realized he’d already known that.

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