Episode 3.5, A New Leaf
The Chain Links
this excerpt from
A New Leaf
by Kerry Alan Snyder
is freely available under
a Creative Commons License
(Attribution/No Derivative Works).
Your Will wavers as you tremble exposed on the shore, facing the river. The border of no return assembles 20 meters behind you and Sis, Quions vacillating vicariously in a makeshift squall line of desperate desiderata. You can smell the need here; the thick seawind at your back carries the decay into your nose like a heavy rotten club hewn from old driftwood.
“Weekin do this, right, Sis? Manta ‘ll carry us ‘cross.”
Xenia seems confident as ever. “She’s there, I can sense ‘er. Canchoo feel ‘er Ter?”
You cannot. You never can until it’s too late to matter. These last few Transitions have been worse and worse, there’s little room left for hope. Devendra, be my umbra. Tesla, bear me true…
You bolt for the waves.
“TERR! Wait UP!”
A primal roar wriggles up into your throat with the sharp garbage-juice taste of bile. You sprint with heavy, desperate steps through the coarse mucky sand. Your shoes get sucked off before your roar has stopped echoing off the ship containers lining the shore like dilapidated effigies of Caribbean beachfront tourist trap hotels. Your socks go with the next successive steps. Tesla tunes in to alert you of an impending drowning danger. You hop and teeter as you run, tearing off your baggy plasto-burlap pajamas. It’s immediately obvious that those rags would drown you if used as a bathing suit. The air holds a November chill that accentuates your terror with a jolt of exhilaration. Every hair stands on end, like you are running inside of a human-sized plasma globe with your flailing limbs as the static-charged anemone tentacles teasing the inner glass surface. An electrified Sonic the Hedgehog in the raw and altogether barreling toward the dark cellophane waves.
As you near them, the waves appear as a jagged undulating blanket of obsidian. A nauseating clumpy churgling sound follows you into the white noise static of the waves; Xenia’s frantic paces belch and gurgle like a line cook angrily fisting a five gallon jar of mayonnaise. You take it as a sure given that Xenia has followed your unsuiting.
“STAY LEFT, Xen! Follow the MOON!” you holler back.
The moon bobs low and huge, a cosmo-sized radioactive medallion looming over the horizon. Its reflection is diced into shards on the razor waves, highlighting the thin crests and nothing else. This is really going to hurt…
Tromping into the wading zone you plan a dive in three…two…one, but your feet are swept into the swift current and out from under you before you can take another step. Falling hard and helplessly on your left side, the ocean cushions your headlong takedown with astonishing grace. Before you can reorient or fathom that last step, you are borne out to sea. Stretch as you might there is no longer sand beneath your toes.
Just as you locate the looming moon a battering ram slams into your back, whiplash and wind out-knocking ensue as a bony clasp grabs a hunk of flesh stretched over your ribcage. “Fuckin’ shit Sis, let GO!” is what you would say if you weren’t hacking up a lungful of acrid seawater. It tastes like burning, like a kerosene martini, three olives, extra dirty. You and Xen had plenty of nautical survival training, but that all goes to Davy Jones’ Locker when you’re tossed into a wretched mess like this. Even the great Terras Nikola Liddell falls apart and claws for his dear life when floundering in the unknown Deep. Even Xenia Curie Liddell, once hailed as the new evolution of Transitors, loses composure in the lightless surf of an apocalyptic abyss. You manage to pry Xenia’s talons out of your flank, wriggling out of a certain loss of flesh.
“SWIM for Dev’s ::sputter:: sake!”
“The TIDE ::gurgle : cough:: it’s so STRONG!”
You roll into your survival sidestroke, navigating the aqueous hills and dales with as little wasted energy as possible. Who knows how far you may have to swim tonight? The water feels either deceptively warm or you feel fortuitously numb. Xenia putters along on your starboard aft, taking to the breaststroke it seems. The two of you struggle for every inch of progress as the waves toss you hither and thither at will and whim, but you possess no gauge for measuring your success. The moon haunts from the infinite horizon. Until your portside flipper hits an unexpected obstacle.
Immediate recoil. Protective fetal ball position. Choking and gasping, you dribble against a ribbon-thin metal mesh screen as the current pulls you. A chain-link fence!? In the middle of the mouth of a seaward river?! What are they keeping in? Or are they keeping something out? With sharp ribbony chain-link?
“XEN, watch ::pfffft:: watch for the fence!”
“WHAAAT? ::gurgle:: something’s got me!”
As Xenia sputters to a gain a painful grasp on the fence to your left, a leaden luminescence below fluxes up to a murky glow, exposing your four legs as limp shadowy tendrils below you. Milky beams cleave through the obsidian surface like misty sabres waving in the unimpressed night. Warmth from the searchlights wipes across the soles of your feet and your undercarriage. Ex nihilo a disconcerting wave of familiarity crashes over you. But between the fence slicing your hands into lunchmeat, the dumpster village, the cruel black water, and this enormous glow below, there is no where else to go. Xenia ducks her head under to peep out the source of this encroaching light.
You follow suit only to catch the last shadowy wisp of your sister’s hair as it whips beyond your threshold of vision, into the gray milk underfoot. As you weigh your options — stay and cling until the fence has carved all the clenching muscles from your paws, or dive after her, fully commit to peril, give yourself over to Devendra’s umbra — the choice is torn from you as your fingers are filleted on the palmside. A wrist-thick cable has pythoned about your leg, knee to ankle, and snatched you abyssward, like a child would yank its teddybear on an aimless, tottering sprint.
Air is not a concern or a possibility. The glow overtakes you and burns through your eyelids, trading in the gray murk for boiling blood red. Pain sometimes defeats itself; this is one of those times. And like Jonah the harpooner, you suddenly realize that sometimes you eat the whale. And sometimes, well, the whale eats you. You are face to enormous face with Manta herself…
Music Piracy and the Listener Mutiny
In this final semester of law school, I completed what Lewis & Clark calls an A-paper. It’s a longish research paper, gotta write one to graduate, good stuff. I treated mine as a thesis of sorts, a culmination of the aspects of Copyright law (my specialty) that interest me most, namely those that apply to music piracy. It ended up being more about the recording industry and the evolution of the music business, which is enormously more intriguing than any law ever written. So if you feel like a little non-fiction, dive in…
A-Paper Print
Episode 3, A New Leaf
Dumpsterville
this excerpt from
A New Leaf
by Kerry Alan Snyder
is freely available under
a Creative Commons License
(Attribution/No Derivative Works).
Oh the inhumanity! You awaken. Upheaval to boot. Unkempt extents stretch on without apology. A wake-willing waft of rancid coffee rushes over you. The atmosphere is nothing, if not acid.
Quions trundle by never wondering at the untrustworthy underneath. The nethers thunder ruthlessly. The Quions exude apathy, belying their gutshot existences.
Hope upends.
You notice the anonymity with sudden, resounding shock. No acknowledgment from the Quions. It’s hard to tell if you exist here or if you are somehow viewing this scene through some clandestine portal. No matter, hold no doubt, the environment impresses upon you conclusively.
Colors are washed into a diseased orange. Lo-pressure sodium bulbs no doubt. Like a Wal-Mart parking lot at 3 a.m. The carnivore-red Ford Festiva would look beige here, as would the piercing azure in the eyes of the Lady of the Lake offering Excalibur aloft. The watery tart!
You wallow in refuse, in refusal and denial. The bed in which you lie seems to be garbage decades old. In fact the Maruchan wrapper caught on your ear faintly recalls an expiration date circa 10 years ago.
“What year is it? How do I know that?” The Tran-SI-tion… ah yes.
A surreptitious head’s lean out from this offensive bed yields a near divine intuition on your surroundings. You don’t dare toss the scalawag ramen noodle wrapper, nor even move a single, unnecessary muscle. Terror: it is the only sure thing here.
This furtive glancer, your sister, stirs from her slumber in disguise, silently raises up on an elbow in the rubbish. Only now can you realize your own decrepitude. Your hand flies to your mouth to find a random deficit of teeth, like running your fingers over a pearly Fibonacci sequence. 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, Devendra’s ASS! Poor sister isn’t the pinnacle of personal weal, but her recently revived response to your ugly mug invites no personal confidence. It’s time to flee. The next Channel, we must escape!
This place is a dumpster. Literally. You lie in a dumpster, on top of a dumpster, on top of a dumpster. Around you, three stories tall in robotic order lie similar tenements. In fact, after three blinks, they are the same. Symmetry pervades. Nauseating symmetry. The rows extend beyond your short sight, the air is fuzzy. But from what you can gather the only lifestyle is that into which you have awakened. All you see are lines of dumpsters, stacked on one another, weighing themselves down, weighing each other down. Orange light defies the once-calculated beauty of the decayed components of this place.
Poetry has perished.
What is extraordinary is the irrefutable and pervading sense of stealth. The Quions that trundle by clearly cannot perceive your presence, nor your sister’s. However any sense of security is paperthin. Enough fluff, time to thicken your skin.
You whisper, “Sis.”
“I’m here, Terras.”
“What now?”
“Shouldn’t we dig? I’m so hungry.”
“I’m scared Sis. Things aren’t right.”
“We should dig.”
You climb and amble down from your unfortunate perch. No bird stirs. The wind in the avenue is deafening, blowing a torrent of filth in your eyes. Orange everywhere now browned out by the teeming gusts. Anyone you see is following you. Anyone you see.
As the desperation sinks in, you notice your sister’s eyes flitting to the barely-seen corners you pass. Walking quickly, you pass many corners, of course. The moon is an imaginary orb, an imperceptible, periodic source of general glow. The orange pallor is penetrating. Whatever sun there might be out there is also too dim to be noticed, too distant to reach this sphere of degradation. What luck! Better get a move on.
Entropy has accelerated here and there’s no point in fighting it. Or am I just late? Is it late? Every hungry glance from a passing Quion reinforces this. It would be inexplicably lucky that you survived the night, had your Transitory Umbra not foreseen the complex dismay here.
“Let’s leave.”
It’s a long walk to the river, half an hour, hard to tell. The sky is less monochromatically umber here, clouds swirl and curl violently. The river is more an ocean, two miles wide by Sis’s estimation, and the caps and troughs could envelop a U-Haul of whatever size or designation. The outermost rows of domiciles along the shore consist of the trailers from semi-tractors long left to trail without sufficient tract, beached ship containers, rusted steel boxes shielding rusty, steely denizens.
Episode 4, A New Leaf
Manta Ray—Bon Voyage
this excerpt from
A New Leaf
by Kerry Alan Snyder
is freely available under
a Creative Commons License
(Attribution/No Derivative Works).
You look up and there is a Star! The clouds hold the milky glare and glint of the pulsing pockets of fanfare below. Neon here, radon there, halogens here and there. The glimmer and glare obscure the primal truth of the raving masses. You couldn’t hear them from here, no chance, but the earth trembles in trepidation at the revelry of the masses. Lightning peals off Tesla’s mask, and Devendra must not be far behind.
You blink at the flash and in the distance you see twin torus-shaped wire coils, like robotic beanstalks wearing enormous copper turbans, sizzling as their omnipotent moment passes. The heavens seem to have met their matches. “Tesla shall be heard, hold no doubt.” The Transition begins and things seem gradually furrier; unexpected meaning darts out of every nook.
The ground is moist and warm; it is good Terra here. That Star now has a companion. They drift in resolute tandem, as the hum of ultramassive lightning storage capacitors charging rumbles over you from across the landscape. It is a primitive people here: their sustenance, sanitation, and shelter are all provided for and run on the wireless magnetic power generated from (and somewhat causing) the lightning. You’ve seen this before, long ago. The air has that same resonant shimmer as in the 3rd Transition, through the empty space. The Helix have been here, with their delicately coiled self-devoted monuments flash-frying the sky, driving the locals insane with productivity. They plant the coils first. Then the locals have everything they need. The rest is now an assumption. You think, “About 47 Transitions now and those things pop up twice. The odds of that are….” A cold shudder traces your veins.
Here the Big Bang was a Big Pop. Entropy was noticeably slower. No meteors fall, no comets mystify, no stars shoot, nor novae super. It’d be interesting to know if this place is closer to the Pop than we were to the Bang. This universe seems young, but it is also slow. So perhaps, like the 30something angina-ridden Wall Street stock trader and the mortally panplegic, octogenarian MacArthur fellow, each vying for the Miss Universe title, it is a strange collision of the swift shrift and the slow know.
Either way, the Coils have found their places; the locals have toiled for centuries to situate them just as the Prophecies have thunderously implied and impelled. Every time you see them — “Devendra be my umbra” — your soul quakes with the thought that this quest is futile. That you have picked the wrong side, as if one could imagine sides as dimensionally possible in a conflict of this scope and scale. There must be a right side though, something perpendicular to the wrong way, the wrong ray.
Anymore you feel like a ray yourself. Dart headlong in this singular direction. Change orientation, prepare the buffer, ignite, and dart again. Never the same place or time. Hardly ever a recognizable biome, though thankfully you, the Transitor, can avoid prohibitively antibiotic environs. The Morphaser always sends an expendable probe, at least every time so far, that catches and returns a momentary glimpse of the potential destination. If that glimpse yields nothing arable, potable or spirable, it just rolls the 7 Phase Dice again. The destination-generator always struck you as more of a celestial spinning wheel, a destiny-generator minute, unknown fibers and filaments to your delicate thread of fate. “Hey, it’s a living!” you recite. Transit survival is but your secondary objective. You remain a ray of hope, just a sadly confused one.
As the Transition continues, the second star twitches towards the first. A band of light hangs in your retinae. Like a famished squirrel watching a bench-fixed old man waving a white-hot acorn, you boggle and reel. A signal, a warped luminous ring like a loose rubber band breaks through the milky clouds; below this skyborne portal-to-the-galaxies the milk swirls into the wiggling maw in an upward flurry, and the curls and wisps uniformly come to shape around the emerging form. It’s MANTA! In the universe that is your protean progenitor, your personal font, Manta is a zodian known. Even to the Radix, for Millennia, Manta is the omen of blissful upheaval, the harbinger of happiness. The Manta skates down through the heavens, flagellating nebulae like a cat with nine angry tails and only one left life. Change is afoot. At hand? Blackness stomps out the sky, leaving no doubt to hold. Everything else follows suit. Sound ceases with a whistling whisper. The terran warmth beneath you dissipates into numb deprival, and the soft waft of the hume with it. Smell is always the last to fade, sometimes seeming even to make the Transition with you. If only you could remain anywhere….
Episode 2, A New Leaf
It’s A Bum’s Life
this excerpt from
A New Leaf
by Kerry Alan Snyder
is freely available under
a Creative Commons License
(Attribution/No Derivative Works).
Terras comes to with some slobber-infused cardboard for a pillow. He jolts up bolt straight and board stiff, now wearing a rancid, patchwork, paperpulp beard. He moans at his forlorn distortion in the glossy waxed clearcoat of the straight-8 2024 Tesla Bronto parked on the curb at his bedside. In this plane he is no longer a boy. his matted hair masks a leathery mug, a rotten puckerhole for a maw, cavernous sockets, and a left hook of a schnozz. Devendra delivers yet another convict kick to the kidneys. At what point can it really not get any worse? These Transitions are tough enough without coming across as rotten meat.
The street feels deserted. Terras, no doubt due to his training, senses that he should remain unseen. The hooded figures intermittently skulking past elicit no hope or expectation of conversation or compassion. They fail to notice even the Bronto’s effervescent oily glint in the mauves and taupes of the pinched avenue.
“Feels like getting pissed on by Daun herself. This cardboard shit smells like a dog’s last breath.” Terras impotently smears it up his cheek with his thumbknuckle.
The Bronto’s door unclasps: a click, a snap, and the hermetic seal pops with a gush. At Terras’ eye-level a waxed and booted foot plunges to the pitted pavement from the narrow starboard berth. The door flies agape. Light gushes over Terras, through and into him it seems. The Transitor is utterly consumed. He can feel the light spewing back out of his eye sockets. “Ogh! Tesla… the power!” He acquiesces, obliteration impending. There is no conceivable concept of safety in this situation, only the leastworst response, as he knows from his Transition training. Flaccid, blank, whiteout.
Only this time it’s nothing to do with Tesla. A Transition might have been preferable. Blinking back into consciousness with a waft of mink oil barely seasoning the cardboard stench on his upper lip — “What a crock of shit! Unh-CHOO!” The sneeze shakes a sizable chunk of brain cells loose. Rattling like cracked marbles down through C1, now C2, into the spinal cord and down to the phantom tail he can still feel whipping behind him in frustration. “Hard to tell how long ago that was,” he concedes to himself. It is impossible to tell, really. A mechanical device, such as a timepiece, cannot come across in a Transition. In fact very little of anything can make the journey. The body does not make it. Parts of the mind do. Those self-aware tidbits, the ganglia that perceive stimuli, and the baser regions of intuition usually Transit. The bare minima for human to continue being. Only sometimes it’s not a human he’s being.
Sometimes he climbs silicon trees and breathes chlorine. Sometimes he has a tail. The Impact caused many splintered versions of the truth, of reality. But only Tesla’s Transition has made it possible to compare these truths. While there are some extraordinary outliers, most seem derivative of a choice few. Terras’ ostensible objective remains whether, when, and where these dominant fissures will settle their differences. Hence the devaluation of time-telling. The truths that have blossomed and pollenated other splinters do not seem at peace. Their apparent gripes could predate the Impact. Some camps at the Teslacademy hold that the truths had some hand in it, but that time is not a proper canvas upon which to paint the argument. Their detractors, notably the Daunists, insist that the Impact was the absolute beginning, all splinters leading back to a gentle ball-peen hammer strike on the window of existence. Many Daunists, the orthodox of the bunch, purport this window has a fatal edge which will lead to the permanent separation of the splinters, to a final crash, a chaotic sorting.
But not Terras. He’s seen too much to think things could be that orderly. He’s even had a tankard of carbon tetrachloride with the King. Though he shan’t have had a clue what was going on without Devendra. At least one of the truths will still share its toys.
His phantom tail stops twitching as his eyes climb the mink-oiled boots near his face. The oily sheen yields to grimy shadow as he pans skyward, rolling onto his back. Way, way up there, past her shade-cloaked figure, hovering in the thigh-bruise-colored sky like watchtower beacons — like the Manta — her lenses glow like faceless moons, reflecting the beams bursting from the Bronto’s cabin, the ones that toppled Terras only moments ago. Graciously the beams forego a second joust. Squinting at the airy contusion above and the moon-eyed backlit gargoyle (gargirl?) looming overhead, Terras manages a marginally toothy grin.
“Roust!” she booms like a stretched out snare drum.
Memoirs of an Alter Boy, Entry 1
Episode I
10:22 ante meridian, October 1988. Age 6, 1st grade in a Catholic school in a blue collar Midwestern city.
Mrs. Wadorf peers over her silver wire-framed glasses, lenses the size of tea saucers and nearly as opaque. “Okay boys and girls, time to take out your reading books. We’re starting on the next lesson today, reading aloud. We’ll start at the back of the classroom today, with the end of the alphabet for a change.”
Katie Win, bob haircut, red and navy blue plaid skirt, white polo, blissful surprise sparkling through the hole in her smile, wriggles in her seat, the toes of her Keds just dabbing at the Desert Storm terrazzo. She already has her finger on the first line of the lesson, already has the self-confidence of a 7 year old, already knows her place in the world it seems. With a nod from the teacher, she begins: “Adam goes to the store. Apples are on sale today. He buys an apple for Eve.”
Looking back, I should have puked with disgust at this vicious and subversive indoctrination. In fact, one day in Wadorf’s class, I did puke. All over my desk. All over my orange crayon, sized for a fist, and the pulpy picture of Jesus giving a sermon. I was doing the skin parts with orange. Everyone did. Skin is orange when you’re only given 8 Crayolas (or Rosearts, what have you). Luckily my sick missed the other 7 which were organized like everything in my tiny world at the time, neatly in their yellow and dark green box. Red, gap, Yellow, Green, Blue, Purple (Violet), Black, Brown. Lid flap closed, package in the upper left corner of the desk, aligned parallel and equidistant to the edges. Things were so simple then.
For the next few weeks Jesus had yellow skin with red and brown shading and I learned that I would not become an artist. In the meantime, the Gospel of Spend was read daily just before morning recess, four sentences at a time, proceeding through the torturous alphabetical order of our surnames. At some point that year, I became “Schneider” because my last name is terribly difficult to pronounce if you’re a blue collar asshole’s child. It’s Snider. Sn-I-der. Sn-EYE-der. Fuck it. Dad says people called him Schneider too. At first it seemed that calling a kid by his last name was a way to elevate oneself socially. An uplifting distancing. But as the kids and I sorted out, made friendships, made enemies, traded chips at lunch and dared each other to swat bees and climb trees, at some point Springa became Jay, and Calson became Vale. First names were reserved for people that wouldn’t tell the girls who you “liked”. People that wouldn’t Benedict Arnold my skinny neck in Four-Square. People that blocked for you in two-hand touch (read: shove like a sumbitch) football.
Actually Vale didn’t do any of those things to earn a first name basis. He ate worms, then immediately kissed girls, did not abide the 5-second rule, and never knew what line we were on in the Gospel of Spend. He didn’t play football or four-square. He always lost anyway, I don’t blame him. Some kids grow faster than others. And some kids grow gills behind their ears and webs between their toes. I grew fast, but only speedwise, not in size since I was nearly a year younger than the average Schmo in my grade. Vale grew into the love child of Mogwai meets the Creature from the Black Lagoon.
I was the second shortest kid (which means boy to a first grader at my school, since girls were still an alien species of some sort) in my grade. Vale Calson, then me. I suppose I felt an obligation to ignore his clandestine but well-known deformities, because he was Shrimp and not me. I was just Schneider, and they picked me second for football most of the time. Anyway, the school’s second favorite way to enqueue their students was by height. And they loved putting us in a line. The expressions “get in line” or “get put in line” never held any mystery for me. I spent my first few years of social awareness in the rear of lines which had not been ordered according to any apparent overriding system of justice or merit. Rarely, when the teachers or administrators were caught unawares, the anarchy of a “first-come, first-served” line was tolerated, but only for as long as it took to empty and with thunderstorms of scolding showering the clusters of buddies and BFFs. Why didn’t they want us to be next to our friends? Was this some sort of preparation for life blossoming from the wisdom of the Catholic gorgons who taught us? If it was, I still have not attained their level of pious enlightenment.
Back to Vale. He and I would somewhat frequently end up lined up at the edge of the altitudinal bell curve. School picture day for example. Christmas Pageant stage direction. First Communion, by height, what in the Holy Fuck does height have to do with receiving the Eucharist? I now suspect the priests in our pariochal faculty had height-related boy fetishes. And Principal Smirko, in league with these unforgiveable pederasts, wrote the rulebook (literally). But that’s a different story for a more melancholy day.
Vale, with his eyes enormous, round, and wideset like an owl, had two expressions. Mischief and suspicion. Today it was mischief but he wasn’t even up to anything, just standing complacently, maybe plotting a caper. Roll call in the background, “Brigelain, Sarah”… meek, paste-eating Sarah raises her hand like a curtsy. “Cook, Mike” (snickers erupt like popcorn) … Mike, busy farming for boogers to consume, raises his left arm with a marionette’s casual limpidity. On down the alphabet while lined up by height, really rubbing in the hierarchical classist philosophy we were steeping in like moth-eaten tea bags. I know I lost some guts in those years. Back then I had some raw courage. Like a PCP addict throwing cars type of courage. Chew your leg off to escape a bear trap courage.
Flash forward, my bravery continues, waning but throbbing.
3:07 post meridian, April 1989, 2nd grade, the dismissal bell rings. That’s what people do when they are done using you. Dismissal. I slowly meander across the recess yard, which is an ocean of splintery wood chips circumferenced by a jagged railroad tie shoreline which was elevated to just the right height to trip you while you scurried in a utter terror with the football for the final hurdle out of the woodchip sea into the end zone. There were many injuries. Tim Stucker became a notorious sissy for crying “MAH-MEEEE!!!” every time his palms and knees got skinned in such a trip. Today there had been no injuries, and unbeknownst to Vale and myself, Rose seethed with unsatiated bloodlust. She was in 1st grade, was as tall as a Kindergartner and weighed as much as a 7th grader. Her ponytail was nearly as long as Vale, poor little Mogwai. Toting my Spiderman backpack and sporting my Nike Air Force high-tops across the wooden hazard zone, I came upon a bewildering sight in the church’s lawn between the school and the parking lot where mom and Aly sat waiting in the maroon Vanagon. Rose, seated on an undecipherable mess of limbs and school uniform, with her ponytail like a widow’s veil hanging over the purple straining face of my partner in shortness. Vale! He’s dying!
My blood boiled. I became a rabid elephant. Rage as though I had never felt anything but bliss. My face must have glowed red like an electric stove element on high. Backpack down, shoulder down, CHAAARRRRRRGE!
What happened to me next was the same as what would happen to a raging bull that runs full speed into a silicone breast implant the size of a dumptruck. I felt the softness envelop me, absorb me, and then I slid, somehow violently considering all the cushioning, to the ground, flat on my back. Rose, hoisted herself into a makeshift sumo stance, facing away from me, and collapsed like a pre-Subway Jared on his couch, only I was the couch. Blackness. Warm navy corduroy death shroud. “Mommy?” I peeped. Stucker would have been proud. Who you gonna call? Ghostbu…
When I came to, if I ever actually went out, Mom was heaving the one-girl hogpile off of me. Apparently she was doing PCP at the time too. Rose rolled to a stop in the grass, caterpillared to her feet like a two-year-old, and lumbered away with a vindictive air of obesity. Maybe she was just looking for a seat because they put the parking lot too far from the school. Maybe Vale was her one true love and I interrupted their first attempt at coitus. Maybe my ribs were broken. I only knew one thing for sure. It was something standing in line at the store could fix. So I waited my turn, and got a grape Crush to soothe my aching pride.
Episode 1, A New Leaf
“Whisk, Whisp and Shudder”
this excerpt from
A New Leaf
by Kerry Alan Snyder
is freely available under
a Creative Commons License
(Attribution/No Derivative Works).
Whiskers brush over his face like a sympathetic caress. The odor of musk is confounding and confusing, then somehow comforting comfitting fitting. The underbelly of the beastly frex consumes his meager coiled body in a fur coat—just as Devendra would want. Flashes of infancy, nestled and nursing, tiptoe into the back of the boy’s mind.
“Thank Devendra,” thinks the boy. “Wait… De-who-dra?”
The Transitions are becoming strangely intuitive. His nerves settle. Always a bit edgy right after a Transition. But here and now, blissfully escutcheoned against the tempestuous tendrils of zap and sizzle sliding nearer and hovering lower upon their approach, he is warm and safe from the storm.
Lightning carpetbombs the lush underbrush between the boy and the foothills. The strikes and bolts strobe-flash away the indecipherable grays of a dusk like any other, shades and variations of the same colorvoid flash into and out of hues of a dusty brilliance. Rain may be coming—the silky hairs of his musky surrogate coat bristle with a vague charge of distant electricity.
But it is no shock. He knows without knowing how that at the end of every Wilk the storms will rise with empty threats. He knows the wind will whistle ominously, spinning and weaving its airy gray threads with the intent to loom. The wind’s haunting whispered melody leaves its resolving note to imagination — a luxury the boy both enjoys and employs. He hummles a complimentary phrase, resonating his torso in a deep harmonious tone along with each note that he whistles. The melody twists in the tingling air, into an unexpected, questionably apt counterpoint.
“Isn’t that the way things seem to be going…?”
The boy shudders as the wind changes, expected as it may be.
“Getting dark quick. Just better stay put.”
He shrugs to himself. In such shadowy environs he would typically be overwhelmed by the terror of the unknown, crippled by his scotophobia.
“If you lay here very still…,” he thinks. Neither this beastly bedding nor the beastly squall seem aware of his presence. “At least until you get your bearings and the luggage arrives.”
Ha! He has only just arrived, but he knows the storm will come for him, and for all the rest besides. “That’s why they sent you, on the Transition,” recalls the boy.
He takes inventory of his condition: not lame or crippled, still humanoid, warm, breathing, starving and bewildered. Ten fingers, have to assume the toes, joints in the proper locations, hipbone connected to the thighbone and so on. The chance of mutation has been greatly attenuated as much as possible since the early rounds of ill-fated test runs. But it’s still even odds on maintaining a sound mind. He sighs out a consolation.
“It’ll have to do. They turn the knobs and I make the hops.”
Of course, the musky frex the boy was swaddled in couldn’t have failed to notice him. And what storm is aware of anything, itself or otherwise? As divine luck would have it, frexes quite enjoy napping with nearly any warm-blooded creature. The boy had found himself wrapped in a giant snuggle monster. A frex, due to its intense circusfire ionic charge, will naturally draw storm clouds to it. But that same intense charge also narrowly deflects the inevitable strikes of lightning, bolt by bolt, much as the opposite poles of two magnets will attract but not physically contact each other. Well, either the frexes are charged or Zeus likes to play ‘graze the frex’. In fact, while on a traipse through the frex sector late in the Wilk, one will come upon a scorched dot matrix of rings six meters across where frexes had weathered lightning storms in ironic, defiant slumber, snickering while snoring.
Miffed by the faint humming and whistling within its haunches, the frex redistributes its weight slightly, grounding itself against the storm as it stretches chin to rest on back feet, overlapping tail to lend eyes a sleeping mask. Monstrous as this frex may be, it be no brute, not even a bit of a brute be it.
Suddenly the boy feels a quake, as though the earth were on the verge of a convulsive tantrum, as though the ground beneath him may open—the gaping maw of Gaea—and render him a bony morsel for the silty soil beneath. Terror pounces from his cerebrum to his extremities, momentary frigid rigormortis, trailed closely by a tidal wave of full-body flaccidity. In this helpless state, the boy reconsiders his stationary strategy. The still-charged air slowly wafts the frex equivalent of a belch into his limp nostrils, and as the smell of half-digested gope hits his old factory, the assembly line springs to life.
Foulness! Nothing should smell like this, dead or alive. He swallows a mouthful of stomach acid that has attempted a hasty escape only to splash against his enamel portcullis. He nearly sprains his neck with the shudder that hits him like a baseball bat. Images of the vilest of piles spring from intentional disremembrances of a life once lived, ancient alternate history preceding all of his Transitions.
“Hope the green tunnel was a wise choice. Everyone dug the greenness back there,” he thought, “so I just jumped at the chance. Maybe shoulda read that Bardo Thödol a little more closely.” This makeshift womb at the brink of safety is certainly not the worst of the alternatives. A little hairy. Sublimely stinky. But it has its benefits, this frex — a comfortable aura.
“Devendra, share with me.”
He begins to pray aloud without questioning the sudden onset of religious knowledge or sentiment.
“Let my energies intertwine with thine, and with those of my Pangaean companions. Let us tie the Living Knot and, like the vines and the veins, stretch into the bliss of nothingness without purpose. As two have become many, until many are one.”
“Better get some sleep while you can, Ter — damned disjointed names always fumbling across first — Terras. Bet that’s me…” The trans-planar memory update can take a while sometimes, but the names and prayers are welcome signs that the download has begun.
A Vomitorium for Terrasites 