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.

Ghosts of Underland

Alice stumbled upon the unmoving unbody of that which once lived, half become one with the ground she tread on. She screamed and ran, trampling over the corpses of so many more things that she once depended on. When they called to her, she could not look back.
.

In the clearing where the moon lay, Alice sat herself down to rest. A glowing something set itself down beside her, twinkling and sighing. But Alice did not see it, and, when she collapsed of exhaustion, landed upon its delicate frame.
.
Another unmoving dead to haunt the next passerby, two or three more, five or ten, a thousand. We are all trampling, falling, killing machines, filling the world with the death of our passing. It is who we are.