Fixtion - Your Weekly Fiction Fix

Awake

2009-03-02T12:24:00.002-04:00

Well, hello my mystery. Today I awake again. Sleep slips away as I emerge from the waters, salt-stained. I saw the age-old rocks, cuddled together like hot embers beneath the waves, burning unabated. Warm-heart, warm-centre, a heat to bathe the creatures. No science has breached the foam, the fury of waves, the heavy calm. The weight of the ocean holds me. Oh, the tenderness. There are no sharp edges in Eden. But it is the shore, the meeting place of your choice, where we make a fire and eat fish. I am eating with you now. I am with you now. It is you now.

Fire Hydrant

2008-05-26T14:31:00.002-03:00

That sun, too bright, tracing destruction through the fibrous strands of his iris. Laying prone in the sand, wide-eyed and gaping at heaven. When horror comes, it chases you subjectively. You run, but it’s carried along inside you, so the epicenter of terror remains confusingly close and curling at your sternum. You think it’s out there, in the world, and if you can just get around the next corner, the next edge of whatever that large object is ahead, you might just be able to duck low and hide, quietly. But it’s not out there. It wasn’t outside of Ryan, either, not outside.

So he let the light in, the bright roaring sun. It could race through him and burn it out – the gut-fear, black and popping epileptic. But something else happened.

The searing rays of on high found the wide open compartments of his mind where meaning was kept. Meanings so full and young, unfettered and let free to roam around where they would, unprotected. They could not withstand the photonic flood, and they sang sharp and high choruses as they sintered out of existence. Ashy cinders collected in the dome of his head, piles of spent carbon.

When he woke his body remembered all the things it should: how to stand, to walk, to understand space. But his head had no binding reference around which to chain all of the objects appearing before him. There was only space, and places where space was not – curiously shaped bundles of occupied space. This is what happens when you lose meaning.

But the fire hydrant changed all that. It had a symmetry. And a hardness that was pleasing to his hands, a coolness that comforted. It was a beacon of promise, of greater things behind, and beneath, and maybe even above. He clutched it like a child, traced its shape with his fingers and whispered foreign syllables to it like an old wizard calling to life a breathless golem.

In time, strange occupied spaces that moved much too quickly came and took him away. No one ever could regain contact, though they tried, his brothers especially. If they knew, they would bring in the fire hydrant and begin there. For in a small dark room near the base of his skull, cuffed and bound and protected from all that could dare harm, is a little ember of meaning, glowing and alive, alone, full of potential.

Business Man: 7

2007-12-22T08:58:00.000-04:00

In a meeting. Taking the minutes. I’m writing these words instead of “Mr. Firewell inquires about a new lunch hour directive,” or “Ms. Claire shows her report for monthly profit – what’s that yellow stain on her sleeve?”, or “Bob chews his gum like a mad cow”. We’re sitting in the boardroom, which rests at the northwest corner of the building. Glass circumferences us, from floor to ceiling, and we have a broad view of the domain about us, the structures of power jutting up from the ground like quills, at their very tops antennae, syringes, pricking the sky with red and white winks. It is overcast. I hope for rain. Cathy smiles at me, she has told a joke, chuckles trickle out politely. She turns back to the overhead, her hair black silk swinging. Outside it is raining. I see the drops beginning to collect on the glass, peppering crystals. My daughter loves the rain. She’s running to the window right now, her finger touching the glass, her nose pressed up to the pane, she’s asking if she can go outside. The sitter concedes, and she puts on that pink outfit – pink boots, pink raincoat, pink umbrella. She’ll decide not to take the umbrella, and she’ll drink the sky with a tiny outstretched tongue, levelling her gaze once in a while to look at me and laugh. Look at the sitter and laugh. Chuckles offer themselves politely again, Cathy has told another joke, profits are up, the meeting is over, and the minutes, the fast-moving, slipping minutes are safely locked inside my laptop.

Kulkaran

2007-12-18T15:29:00.001-04:00

Kulkaran? Bound, but just now let loose into the ball field. This is his second trip to the Great City, a prisoner of the cocoa masters, but his nakedness is all glory and jungle oil as he walks across the grass, wooing the eyes of the crowd his way. There are other prisoners, but he does not look at them. He keeps his pantheric gaze firm on the team across the way: they are stone-armoured, feather-headdressed, jade-painted. At their feet, one ball. It might as well be the globe of the earth.

On both sides of the field high stone walls, lined with small loops, contain the players. Ball in loop, earth in void, and Kulkaran lives. Ah, but he is not like them, these stone makers. He has secrets collected in the net of his hair – caught as he passed through trees and under rivers and over mountains.

The match begins, and they have weapons. Kulkaran is lake-weed, hovering at the edges. There are fonts of blood, and prisoners dying, and a ball knocking around in the air, spin-struck.

Kulkaran sees an opening, and he is yellow adder, fang-striker, snagging the heel of a jade runner. He clamps upon him hawk-swift and taloned, removing the headdress and the armour, smearing the paint on his own body. Foot-stomp, face-crush, he dons the stolen outfit. He remembers the sting of the tree ant, and becomes pincer-toothed. He bites, and bites, and avoids the ball, biting. He is killing prisoners. He is gaining trust. He is standing by the crowd, smiling, red-tongued.

The ball comes towards him then, a rubber sparrow of speed. Now Kulkaran swats away the tree ant, and is tender-foot, the puma. He turns and warps his way forward, keeping the ball from touching his hands, powering up on pounding thighs and curling shoulder blades. Trickle-step, stutter, and thunder rolling on the field. Kulkaran heaves the middle name of lightning and throws it into the ball, rage-wise. Through the loop spinning is freedom; sweet, sacrificial freedom, burning cocoa in the morning sky.

Business Man: 6

2007-12-11T21:46:00.000-04:00

I’m in the kitchen darkness. The laptop is shouting light. My hands glow, tap-tap-tap. My daughter lies in bed, asleep, and I cannot describe the ache in my chest when I think of her. My suit is burning on me like an infection; I want to rip it off, get into some old jeans, into a t-shirt, barefoot, plain. I want to make Cheerios and waffles. I want to spill milk on the counter, I want to hear her coming down the stairs and saying my name. But there’s still four hours until dawn, when the sitter cracks the eggs and burns the toast, slides the paper in under the door, leaves. I’m the shadow-father. This is why my body falls only as imagination. I struggle to keep writing this. I stare at the last sentence for fattening seconds. My fingers are shaking. I’m squeezing them in, but they’re dripping, the tears. I’m in the kitchen darkness. She’s sleeping, and goodness reigns.

Fly

2007-12-11T21:28:00.000-04:00

For sport, nothing beat cloud diving. He manoeuvred his twin-engine upwards, tugging on the throttle-bar. One hand flashed out to grab his sunglasses – big round reflective things – and he pushed them on his face. Up, up, pressed against the back of the seat, gravity pulling him gently, stretching his face. It felt as though he were pushing through something dense, like jelly.

A wall of white enveloped him and muffled the engines. So slow now, and the roaring, high-pitched and throated. He could see the iron pistons, hammering, the combusting gas an infinite stream of fire and vanishing heat. He punched on the radio and turned it up full blast.

When he broke, mist trailing off her wings, he let out an adrenal whoop of joy. For a moment he rose suspended, almost going nowhere, the engines beginning to stall. He pushed her forward and levelled her off. Out before him, forested, vast acreages of tumbling cumulus lay frozen in time, sun-sprayed. It was almost another land, and he could not help but thinking that there were indeed people up here, living in the slow-changing landscape, cloud-bound. To the left a great ridge of rolling puff could have been mountains or cliffs. Straight ahead were foothills and curling embankments, hiding invisible rivers of air, where those who lived here spent their days catching slippery wind-fish, or netting packets of flashing light. To the right a hallway of bursting trees vaulted cathedral-like, heavy-laden with sky-fruit, ambrosial, oranges of oxygen balling on branches of white smoke. And directly below – a field, ribbed into rows, hiding the seeds of heaven.

He prepared himself for a dive.

But just ahead something caught his attention. Two tendrils, maybe three, twisting on the field. They were moving quicker than the landscape, almost detached from the surroundings. He arced the plane in their direction, turning down the radio. As he approached they began to shrink, melting down into the rest of the clouds. Curiosity scampered up his shoulder, bit his ear, spoke sharp nothings.

And that! A shimmering flash of black! Almost mirror-like, a glistening scale. He dropped her into a dive, his heart racing. The tendrils appeared again, bobbing, then slipped back beneath the surface. “What the hell is going…” he spoke aloud, but his voice caught in his throat.

An impossibility.

Endless rows of jagged teeth. A wide and bottomless pink throat, billowing. A tongue, forked, lashing the air. Two caverns, nostrils, and above those a pair of reptilian eyes, milky and cold. He tried to pull her up, but the engines shrieked in refusal, and he screamed his way down into the end of the world.

Daily Roach: Mar. 29th

2006-03-29T11:08:00.000-04:00

My half-finished world is full of four-foot doors and roads that end where, if I had gone but a bit further, may have run the earth through the iron mountains, beyond a craggy sea and towards the settled sun, into a home of warm lights and spicy meals.

Daily Roach: Mar. 28th

2006-03-29T11:06:00.000-04:00

Pain came, that single note, pure and high.

Daily Roach: Mar. 27th

2006-03-27T06:47:00.000-04:00

Who knew that truth was but a by-product of will, that the only absolute was an absolute will? - the bear knew.

Business Man: 5

2006-03-26T21:04:00.000-04:00

I’ve got it – it’s ant hills. These buildings, I mean, they’re all ant hills. What I can’t figure out is where the Queen is hiding. Oh, wait. I know – she’s in my wallet, she’s in the vaults, she’s glowing in green letters on my screen, she’s worn on our lips like chap-stick, she slides out suddenly inside a froth of cologne, pushing her way up our noses. She’s making our mouths water, rising steamy out of the lobster bisque. She lives in the tiny droplets of white wine, she’s the ticking of my watch, the part in my hair, the pattern on my tie, my smile, my handshake, my stance, and she comes up welling like a slowly mounting song from beneath the layered fears of a purposeless existence, saving us at the last moment from insanity, abolishing and then inhabiting that blasphemous question: “why?”. Oh, that’s why. When we lose our way she gathers up our things and wraps her slender arm around ours, guiding us back like a child to the truth of prosperity. The means justifies the ends, she says, and then I understand. Meaninglessness justifies the ending. Do you see my body falling?

Daily Roach: Mar. 25th

2006-03-25T14:59:00.000-04:00

He was born in the mud, and so even in his castle - food-bound, sophisticated - he remembered the taste of dirt, the smell of earth, and that his ending would be the very same as his beginning.

Daily Roach: Mar. 24th

2006-03-24T06:39:00.000-04:00

Oh secret city, I've found your doors by the spread of the compass, centered and circumferenced at the meeting place between soul and spirit.

Daily Roach: Mar. 23rd

2006-03-23T07:07:00.000-04:00

That morning he rose counter-clockwise, moving against the flow of time, a dissident in the current of the universe, tired.

Daily Roach: Mar. 22nd

2006-03-22T21:49:00.000-04:00

So down came fatigue, a fat ghost who draped itself around his frame, gravity moaning.

Daily Roach: Mar. 21st

2006-03-21T07:18:00.000-04:00

I have no hope save hope, and this staff, and this way of walking.

Daily Roach: Mar. 20th

2006-03-21T07:07:00.000-04:00

I am told the walk is cold, the one to the grave, yet here I am bare-footed.

Business Man: 4

2006-03-19T21:36:00.000-04:00

I’m in Café Trezor, below the Building, where we come in droves, one per table with laptop and caffeine, all our chairs facing the big bay windows. It’s the street outside that takes our eyes when we lift them up for apparent thought. We don’t think, but we pretend to, and after a few minutes of watching crowds and cars, bow our heads to write or tap away at the keyboard. We’re working. Mouse-wheels wheeling. There’s a thug standing on the cold street, his big frame covered by half a cow of a red leather jacket, his head rounded by a black toque. He has a goatee and a thick jaw, but I can’t see his face because his back is to us. His hands are in his pockets. He’s big. He’s poor, because he’s asking people for change. He’s not cold, though his breath plumes at every request. He’s a hulk of heat. And he scares those he appeals for help. All of us are using him as a distraction from work, we look up at him instead of the street, at his great shoulders and dominating mass. And we thank God for civilization. We thank Him because we live in this era, and not an earlier one, where the man outside with no money would never ask: he would take, he would make certain, he would demand himself into wealth, exercise his peasantry into kinghood, into rule. But he’s trapped in this epoch. The Building above him towers with a potency he cannot match. It contends with the sky, the great up-wheres, while he contends with the miserly, the small ones, the little folk he could crush or command had he been born several hundred years earlier. Here, put a sword in his hand. Apply scars, popping, on his face. Let the dirt sit on him from nights on the battlefield. Pour the oil of ability over his head, watch his will rise up rage-wise, let the crown of competence glow upon his brow with brilliance and myth and fire. Don’t worry, we’ve got crisp white shirts of armour. It’s the twenty-first century, and the great men have been stripped of legend. The dragons are dead, the mammoth extinct, and the power of the body proved weightless against the power of Organization.

Daily Roach: Mar. 19th

2006-03-19T20:58:00.000-04:00

It has been made complex, grown viral because of a thirst for knowledge, but simplicity still surrounds life, permeates the marrow, giving it that glow.

Daily Roach: Mar. 18th

2006-03-18T08:21:00.000-04:00

I see her after the news, my eyes fat and red with tears, through a blinding flash of foliage which are twenty and seven years, standing in the present clearing, the sun coming down on her old and mighty face, my grandmother, mother grand, with cancer, and smiling.

Daily Roach: Mar. 16th

2006-03-16T07:10:00.000-04:00

Cynicism is settled complacency, the oil field, attempting intelligence, burning.

Daily Roach: Mar. 15th

2006-03-15T07:38:00.000-04:00

That growing acreage was a splitting seed, a dying bird, the ascent of worms.

Daily Roach: Mar. 14th

2006-03-14T07:28:00.000-04:00

One day the pale white face that inhabits the shadow will meet the broad, golden brow that lives in the sun; a romance will occur, and possibly a great work of fiction, though they'll swear it was just a conversation.

Daily Roach: Mar. 13th

2006-03-13T14:13:00.000-04:00

One hour ago, sixty minutes lay waiting by the fire, a neat pile of kindling; now it glows, having burned, scatter-packed cinders, brightening on your breath.

Business Man: 3

2006-03-12T08:06:00.000-04:00

I won’t stifle you with the lack thereof’s in this building. That would be a lazy stream of knowledge, a bouquet of grass when here and there amongst the blades are yet to be found dandelions, bursting yellow. My boss is having an affair. No. All the bosses are having affairs. All the bosses are having affairs with each other. And they all think they are isolated Casanovas, Secret Unique’s, sharp packets of forbidden pleasure in thousand dollar business-wear. Little do they know that the degrees of separation connecting all the shapes of their DNA number less than three. Now listen. All of them coagulated into one person, The Boss, a network of sinew and thought idiotic, like Frankenstein, Bankenstein, only more stupid. In love with itself. No wonder they go to the bathroom so often. The mirrors. Especially James, whose glassy eyes must re-reflect an infinity of self-images; i am, I am, I Am, I AM. He thinks he Is because he Has, and we all agree without uttering a word. We advertise accord with smiles and palm sweat and padded laughter. Funny how watches and shoes validate princes. How car and suit proclaim domain, how logo makes us swoon. I shouldn’t bring up Sheep, but cliché coats every fabric of my office, sluices off every wet and shiny discussion, popping sour and curling up tangy at each dropped syllable, a billion worthless pennies.

Daily Roach: Mar. 11th

2006-03-11T12:56:00.000-04:00

Today she is one word, the orange honeysuckle against the dull brown, but tomorrow she is the epic, our forest of rain.