Stratigraphy

Hylas has been doing the webcam grind for nearly a year now and he’s just barely breaking even. “It hurts… hurts to be… shot. Maybe if I’d known that, I’da shot… shot less people.” The ceiling was off-white. He wasn’t anyone’s prize. “Five hundred days, I said. Do the third row before the second tomorrow, that’s all.” His voice was thick and crumbly, strained.

“Who’s next?” says Karen as the last guy works his way back toward his friends, his lips a little purple with bruising.

“Ah, geez,” he says, and bends over the desk, already hard. Light from the city below travels up his body and over his face as the blinds rotate up leaving a thin oily film that he would feel as he crawled into his cold bed tonight with another half bottle of scotch inside him. First went the tall buildings, the new buildings, then the old, the sturdy buildings, graceless squat buildings, last the shacks and the shantys and the tents and the hoovervilles.

Xiksthan leans forward, kisses him over the many-legged remains of their meal. The kid went to the door with them and he was left alone with the couple. She laughed raggedly. They didn’t know Ed. Lightning flashed and the lights went out and Murphy screamed, high and shrill.

The Sport of Free Men

The batter steps up to the plate and the crowd gets baroque with it.

“Heyyyyyy, 25, you’ve got too many things in your pockets!”

“What do you have in there? Your cell phone?”

“A pack of cigarettes?”

“A deck of playing cards?”

Strike one.

“Is that a walky-talky?”

“You can’t bring your copy of House of Leaves to the plate, 25!”

“25, you’re supposed to put the potato down the front of your pants!”

Strike two.

“How do you slide with all that junk in your trunk?”

“There’s just too much in your pockets! It’s spilling out right now!”

“Aren’t you worried about tearing your pants? With everything you own in your pockets?”

“Emp! ty! out! your! pock! ets!” Clap clap clap clap clap.

A long smash to deep right field and—well, it’s a homerun, what did you expect? 25 rounds the bases, high fives his teammates, avoids eye contact with the crowd. Alas, it doesn’t work. As he returns to the dugout, one final chirp is handed down: “Good thing you hit a homerun, you might have lost your keys if you’d had to really run!”

They go on to win 16-4, but, you know, baseball’s about the journey, not the destination, or so I’m told.

All Children Are Wanted, All Dogs Are Loved

Walkable cities, they say. Jobs a-plenty. Drugstores that don’t lock everything behind glass. Grocery stores staffed with humans. Lights in living room windows, no cameras in the street, benches in the parks. Only a moderate amount of child torture. More kinds of candy bars than you can count. Fifty seven different kinds of cereal, all free of the bacteria that cause explosive diarrhea.

Really, you could do worse.

A riot breaks out, but it’s just mass hysteria; the rumors of flesh-eating cockroaches spreading ebola are just rumors. The fires, looting, assaults, mass shootings, just the byproduct of any complicated society. The sidewalks are paved, the buildings are accessible, wealth inequality is low, computers are new and exciting, winters are cold, summers are moderate, the hole in the ozone is rapidly closing.

Things can only improve from here.

In the urban core, all the Allan Kupers gather in abandoned theaters, deserted shopping malls, abandoned power stations, turn up the music to drown out the human tide. High stakes unsanctioned dance competitions, a wave of revolution on the crest of breaking. The hungering dust settles on food left too long on the counter, but that’s the nature of things. What is not eaten is consumed.

An Inescapable Moment of Joy

for Cody

An oppressive heat, the air still and hot as an oven, and the distant mountains, the lake, the hummingbirds buzzing around the railing, and the railing itself have become as flat as a painting. The sunset striped and gridded, a pixel vision of evening. In the horizontal light, familiar faces blur uncertain, hang slack or twist unexpected like the grain in a piece of wood. Eyes are everywhere, in the curl of a breathing fern, in the pulse of a watching cactus, in the open beak of a hovering bird.

Nighttime, stars stir unsettled through the bronchial branches of a juniper tree, an amber shape that might be a cat crouched atop a wooden fence. Numb inside the gate we weigh it with our eyes, count the limbs, count the tails, count them again as the numbers run away. Is it known? Is it knowable? A dog, five eyes arranged in an arc, wary beside us, fur aglow in the darkness.

Later still, and earlier, time slipping between our fingers, boundaries blur and bleed, ink leeching into paper, into chairs, into the deck of splintered wood, into the glass we struggle to raise to our lips, the cigarette pack we cannot reach. In the darkness, the click of a plastic lighter, the shock of recognition, the distant song of frogs.

Came Back Wrong

A very long time ago:

You go away to war, you lose a leg, you lie in a religious hospital for years, first angry, then bitter, then rotting, then resigned. At home you have a wife, a child, an uncle. Maybe your mother is still alive, but it seems unlikely; she was old. Eventually you tire of the sermons from the hospitaller monks and so you drag yourself out of bed and onto your crutch and start the long walk home, a pilgrimage in reverse, shedding whatever faith you might have once followed on the way, left on the road like fluid from a popped blister.

War has not improved your temper.

When you arrive home, everyone flinches when they see you, first in bafflement, then in fear. Your neighbors never liked you. Your family, come to that, never liked you, either. But still: you have to close the loop of your life before you can do anything else, so you drag yourself to the house you left, the wife you only half-remember, the son whose face you have clean forgotten, even if the normal growth of years hadn’t changed him beyond all knowing.

You walk through the door without knocking.

Your wife looks up and recoils. “Martin…?” she says, and “Yes,” you say, but so too does the man sitting at the table. He looks like you, or like you used to look, but when he stands, he stands on two legs, and his face is unpuckered with disappointment.