Anything Happens

"On this night, in this place, anything can happen,” Simon said, smiling down into Sandy’s sparkling eyes.

And at that moment, abruptly, “anything” happened, just as Simon predicted.

The streetlamp that stood nearly thirty meters away, lighting the street, shuddered. There was a loud and prolonged creaking noise, like a car crash or a ship running along an iceberg.

Sandy and Simon turned towards the lamppost, uncomprehending, as it ripped itself in half. Starting at the base, its pole cut itself neatly into two equal halves, except for the part at the top that bent forward and aimed the lamp downwards. With a tremendous noise, one of the halves lifted up, bending at the center, and took a step forward. Now the lamppost looked like two huge legs attached to a long bent neck with a single large glowing eye on the end.

This long neck bent upward, and the shining eye beamed at them.

"Sandy," asked Simon, "Am I high? I don't remember taking any, but maybe-"

He was interupted by the sudden "woosh" and "stomp" of the lamppost taking another step towards them. This was followed by another and another. Woosh, stomp, woosh, stomp. Four paces and it was standing directly over them, its eye still aimed to shine blindingly onto them.

Sandy and Simon both squinted upwards. "Unfortunately, we're broke, Simon," whispered Sandy, “we couldn't afford drugs to forget taking."

"But you can see this too?"

"The walking lamppost standing over us, glaring down disapprovingly? Yeah I can see it. I suppose you can too then?"

"Yeah. But what do you mean ‘disapprovingly?’ He looks cheerful enough to me."

"Is this really the time for semantics?"

"No, really, he's just shining at us with his lamp, like a normal lamppost. Maybe he's just come over here to be helpful."

"What makes you so sure it's a 'he?' It could just as well be female. I don't see any-"

Sandy was interrupted by the screams of multiple police sirens. They turned, expecting to see several blue and white cars, but instead they saw something very different. Four men on horseback galloped around the corner and sped towards them, crying “Hya! Hya!” at their horses. They had round police lights strapped to their heads, which spun and wailed like a police car’s would. They were nearly on top of Sandy and Simon when they pulled back on their reins, hollering “whoa girl whoa” to their horses. Up close, Sandy and Simon could see that these men wore vests, chaps, and shiny silver spurs; everything a cowboy would wear, neglecting cowboy hats, which had been replaced with the spinning red-and-blue lights. They swung off their horses, whipped out their weapons, and aimed them at the two young people and the lamppost.

“Get on the ground! Get on the ground! You’re under arrest!”

Sandy and Simon were too surprised to respond, but it didn’t matter because the lamppost immediately did an about-face and ran. It clattered down the street, massive metal legs clanging against the asphalt like rusty wedding bells. The strange men leapt back onto their horses and sped after it, applying their spurs liberally to the horses' sides, leaving Sandy and Simon open-mouthed in their wake.

“Simon,” said Sandy, “Next time it’s a night when anything could happen, let me know, and I’ll stay home.”

The couple strolled down the road in the opposite direction, laughing at the bizarre nature of life as only two lovers can.

This One Is Boring

Zak flicked the switch of the lighter over and over. It made the tell-tale rough sound that lighters always make when their flint is spent, but Zak was too drunk to observe this. He turned up the gas on the stove and kept flicking the lighter. The pot full of water for his ramen noodles waited on the counter. His stomach grumbled. He turned the gas up flicked the lighter some more.

Due to his incapacitated nature, he was unaware of the passage of time. Nearly a minute passed with gas pouring from the stove, invisibly filling to room. Zak's bleary eyes were focused on the lighter, and all his energy was dedicated to continuing to flick it near the stove top.

Inside the lighter, a last grain of rough flint was finally shaken lose. It fell to where the metal of the striking wheel was repeatedly scraping. It was caught and dragged along, and, upon being crushed into powder, released a single yellow spark.

The spark met the over-abundance of fuel in the air, and it's heat transferred and spread from molecule to molecule, like white-hot dominoes falling onto each other. The air of the room erupted into blue-green flames. Zak stumbled back, howling, instinctively attempting to avoid the flames swirling about him.

The gas in the air was consumed in half a second, but now every flammable substance in the room had been set alight, including Zak’s clothes. He dumbly rubbed his hands along his burning shirt sleeves and pant legs, scrambling around the apartment, surrounded by smoke, blind for the brightness of the fire. He collapsed on the carpet, howling and flailing.

Moments later, his clothing was but crumpled black tatters and his mind was dizzy from the smoke. But he found that he was otherwise untouched. The flames licked about his body but did not find fuel there. The heat did not harm him. The flames did not burn him. Despite the alcohol in his stomach and the smoke in his lungs, he smiled to himself.

Then the ceiling caved in.

Zak lost his right hand and the deposit for his apartment on that day, but he gained a superpower and learned a valuable lesson: just because you're fire-proof doesn't mean you're invincible.

Everyone Knows What a Song Is

Strange mathematics that everyone knows

before they speak their first word

Odd place that everyone goes

without credentials 

Waves run over each other

vibrations high and low

the stimulation of tiny hairs

connected in wild geometry

growing with sliding symmetry

A sound followed by another sound

Diagrams

Pie charts

Graphs

Something swallows all of those

in a radiant darkness

The cunning slyness

of the music

and your own mind

Mariam Takes Out The Trash

Mariam's wedding had been an unparalleled success up until that moment, everyone agreed. The flowers were perfect. The dress was beautiful. The seating arrangements had appeased everyone present. The ceremony had been without fault. Even the reception had gone as planned: the cake was cut, the first dance was danced, and everything looked like it was going to end without a single slip in the gears of this well-oiled wedding.

But there was a hitch. A very suspicious one, with all the fingerprints of an intentional and shrewd designer.

There were two hundred people milling about at the reception. What were the chances that Mariam’s mother-in-law and her step-mother-in-law would come across each other, both completely unaccompanied? What were the chances that her step-mother-in-law, obsessive compulsive and quite unable to contain herself, would brush the cake crumbs from her mother-in-law's blouse, who of course took great offense?

Though unlikely, that is exactly how it happened.

Words were exchanged, old wounds were prodded, and decade-old disagreements were remembered. Current husbands intervened, which could have put out the fire, but it only served to start new flames. The two men ended up going at each other as well, hollering about what may have been meant five years ago when one had shown up five minutes late to the other's son's birthday party. Uncles and second cousins were soon involved.

Before five minutes had passed, three punches were thrown, a large piece of cake was stuffed into the mother-in-law's dress, and someone was screaming about a challenge to a duel. The cries of "my best dress!" and "pistols at dawn!" were soon drowned out by the wailing of police sirens outside.

Mariam stood by the phone, a slim smile on her face. When asked about this by cousin Sally, she responded, "It's lovely when everything goes as planned, isn't it?"

The other guests all agreed that the only thing stranger than the sudden outburst of violence had been Mariam's expression of serene satisfaction as so many long-quarreling relatives were led away in handcuffs.

Rise Above- Another Mysterious Tale

On that fateful day, the entire nation of Algeria was taken away.

"Taken" implies that some entity did the taking, and it was popularly held that this was so. The means itself were suspect. 

It was three in the afternoon, Algerian time, when it happened. Two million square kilometers of land shuddered and rose up. Rose up, like a unimaginably huge pancake or bit of eggshell, leaving a nation-sized crater in its place. It was lifted (for surely, there was a lifter) up through the atmosphere at an incredible speed, but stayed sound structurally despite being as aerodynamic as a scaled-up piece of paper. Its shadow created a mid-day-night across Libya and, as it rose higher, Egypt.

Experts later recited that this missing slice of earth's crust was .56 miles thick. These experts stammered many such facts into radios and televisions and computer screens, but no amount of reassurance could set the public's rattled minds at ease, and the experts themselves spent many a sleepless night afterwards staring at the ceiling, wondering. Everything they knew about physics had been defied, and the universe did not seem to think it odd at all. The entire impossible event had begun, taken place, and ended in a merely an hour, with no fanfare or harmful after-effects. Not a single atom was split; the only causalities were textbooks.

Once it had passed through the atmosphere, disturbing dozens of satellites, the chunk of earth turned towards the stars. It floated into the star-studded emptiness like a magnificent interstellar Frisbee.

What became of the creatures on the surface? Before they had gone out of range, many of the Algerian population had communicated with their former kin who remained on the surface. Emails, instant messages, phone calls, radio waves. But none who stayed behind could make sense of what they heard or read. Descriptions of bliss. Exclamations of the purest joy. Well wishes. Declarations of perfect love for all. Portrayals of infinite contentment. Smiley emoticons.

What became of that piece of earth, that chosen handful of humanity? Did they asphyxiate in the vacuum of space? Do they travel still among the stars? Have they gone someplace wholly different? Those who remained shackled to the earth wrung their hands and chewed their lips. Talk shows and news programs and comedians considered and debated for decades onward, but no one could know. And no one could shake the unspoken anxiety that they had been left behind.

(Posted 27 July 2016) (Sometimes I pin this to the top of my blog because I like it. So there.)

The Ungrateful Mayor and The God of Night

A thousand burning meteors rained down upon the city of the ungrateful mayor. As they fell, the reason for the destruction passed in whispers between the squalid cellars, dusty rubble, and hastily-built shelters where the citizens hid from the fiery hail. Mothers spoke to their children in hushed voices in the minute-long intervals in the storm, in the silence as deadly as the cataclysm itself, and this is what they said: "The mayor was ungrateful."

The city was utterly laid to waste in the course of one night. Boulder after celestial boulder thundered upon the buildings and streets and any other man-made thing within the city limits, setting aflame that which was not crushed by the impacts. But one building remained untouched, its dome shining in the light of the fires: the temple of the god of night. The god for whose pleasure the city was founded and named and made great. The god to whom the new mayor had not made even the smallest of offerings, though the god had raised him up from the lowly legislature into the fine white brick house mayors were customarily kept in.

Those who dared look outside saw a miracle. Not a single stone of the ancient temple was upset while all the others were brought low. And they knew instantly what this miracle meant: the destruction came not upon the god's house because it was the god who had sent it.

When the sun rose the next day, after the night of relentless bombardment, the citizens gingerly stepped out of their hiding places and into the tender rays of the morning sun. They were drawn through the shabby rubble towards the only building still whole: the temple of the god of night. There, they found a sight that froze the blood in their veins. Something more terrifying than the entire night of destruction from heaven. It was the mayor, that ungrateful agnostic, standing on the steps of the temple, a detonator in his hands.

He looked out over the heads of the crowd, towards the horizon, as if he were addressing the night that now fast retreated from the dawn, and just before he activated the detonator, he said in a thunderous voice, “It’s only fair.”

Where he had gotten enough C4 to reduce the entire temple to rubble, the citizens never discovered. They were never able to ask the ungrateful mayor because none of them ever saw him again. The blast and the debris and the smoke drove most of them away, and when it had all settled, he was nowhere to be seen.

Some say that the last shadows of the night gobbled him up. Others believe him entombed under the carcass of the temple of the god of night. But a few old men, reckless with their great age, had not run from the choking debris of the blast, but remained to see what happened after. They swear that they saw the mayor standing calmly in the haze, lighting a cigar. Then, all these old men say, the mayor turned and strolled into the unending desert, without food, a canteen, or a care in the world.

They say that, but no one believes them.

Already Been Robbed

Glass cracks

Pane breaks

Man enters silently

Eyes search

Hands feel

Cupboard, empty chest

Bright shock

Lights on

Robed man sighs

Look son

There is

Nothing left to steal

When Samantha Met Sammy

Sammy was a small man with a big heart. Samantha was a big woman with no heart at all. Perhaps it was stolen from her, or perhaps she had been born without one. Most likely, she had removed it herself so as to become better at her job. Regardless, it was abundantly clear that it was long gone.

The two of them met at a cage match in South City. He wore a threadbare suit, and she had squeezed herself into something red. She was in the cage, clobbering someone named "Spitfire," and he was in the audience, halfway through a wince, clutching a bag of popcorn.

Across the auditorium, their eyes met. They both felt an instant pang inside. Was it love? Lust? Genetic predisposition? They didn't know. They couldn't even guess. But instantly they both felt the distance between them in a way they had never perceived physical space before: hereafter, no matter how close they could become, they would always feel too far apart.

When the moment ended, it was a jolt for both of them. Samantha was kicked in the head and then placed in an over-the-shoulder arm lock. Sammy spilled his popcorn.