The Green-Walled Tower

Time flies when you only remember six hours out of every day and for Jack, the next few days seem to slip by like ghosts in the night. There were no more scratches on his body or messages in his briefcase, although he pored through every scrap of paper in it.

He talked for hours with Sarah, although the conversations were dry and often frustrating. She would not reveal anything about herself and he knew almost nothing about himself to tell. She was constantly asking how he felt: if he was angry, if he was relaxed. The questions themselves put him on edge, but he never told her that.

Jack began to fixate on her more and more as the days went by. She was the only person he knew in the world and his only contact with the human world. All his pent-up frustration, suspicion, loneliness, and lusty desires—they all became focused on her. He found himself loving her and hating her both, without even knowing who she was.

He wondered what she was like and if he had known her before—out in the real world. For all he knew, the Jack outside knew her and the two of them had lunch together every day. Not that it helped the Jack in here any.

If he was in a good mood, he would tease her and try to cajole her into telling him more about herself. What’s your favorite color? Come on, what’s it going to hurt? Let me guess: is it blue? All he ever got were smiley emoticons and avoidance.

On the fifth day—May 14^th according to the computer’s calendar—Jack walked through the door with a sore foot. The pain was coming from the inside of his left foot. He sat down cross-legged on the floor in front of the TV, covering that part of his foot with his hand and slowly stripped off his socks. He pretended to be stretching and raised his hand slightly to see the side of his foot. Here, the cuts were deeper than before and easier to read. Sarah bday, they read.

He had sent himself another message—against the rules—to say it was Sarah’s birthday. That must mean he knew her on the outside, unless this was only part of the experiment. He was getting frustrated with the whole thing. Sarah would not even tell him when it was going to end; just to be patient. Maybe there were other, darker forces lurking behind her, telling her what to say. He tried to see her as a victim as well in order to shield her from all the rage that were boiling inside of him.

Jack sat down in front of the computer. Yo Sarah, happy birthday!

For a moment, there was no response. Then, How did you know?

May 14 is your birthday, right?

How did you know? Did you remember it? Tell me, Jack, did you remember it was my birthday?

It was either that or admit he had read it off scratches on his foot. Finally, he typed, Yeah, I saw it was May 14 and suddenly thought it was your birthday. I guess I was right.

What else do you remember? Do you remember me? Describe me.

The only thing he associated with Sarah was the icon of the woman in the blue dress, but that probably wasn’t even her. He didn’t even know if the person on the other end of the chat program really was Sarah. They knew he didn’t remember and they were trying to trap him. Suddenly, he didn’t care anymore.

You’re eight feet tall with a lazy eye and long fingernails, he typed. You like raw seafood and nude demolition derbies.

There was no response to this. “Answer me,” he growled. So, what are you doing tonight for your birthday? Got a hot date lined up?

He barely even knew what he was typing. All he wanted was to get some sort of reaction out of her, to make her show herself as human, to show even a little of herself to him.

Wanna go out with me? Come on, just come pick me up. Or just come on in and we’ll screw on the couch.

There was no answer. Jack had been getting more furious as he wrote and now something seemed to explode in his head. “Answer me!” he screamed out loud and picking up the chair, he hurled it at the window.

The chair rebounded off the glass without even leaving a mark. Bulletproof glass. He was looking around for more furniture to throw when the phone rang.

The phone was in the kitchen. Jack had picked it up when he had first arrived, but there was no dial tone and he had ignored it as only a prop. Now, he strode over to it, jerking it savagely off the cradle.

“What.”

It was a woman’s voice on the other end. “Jack, what are you doing?” She sounded scared.

“You got me in a prison here,” he said. “And now I find I can’t even break the windows? I’m done with this. Let me out.”

“Jack, you agreed to do the full length of the experiment.”

“Yeah, well now I’m unagreeing to it. I want out and I want to keep my memories.”

“Jack, please.” There was pleading in her voice. “You must be patient. I know you don’t understand right now, but you have to trust me.”

“Why should I trust you?” Jack demanded. “I don’t even know you. Who are you anyway?”

“I’m Sarah.”

“Do I know you, out there?”

“Yes…yes, you do, but I can’t tell you how.”

“Just tell me if we are related. Are you my sister, cousin, mother?”

There was a slight pause. “No, we’re not related,” Sarah said. “Listen, I have to go. Remember Jack, be patient and trust me.” The line went dead.

Jack put the phone down and went back to the computer, but Sarah had logged off. That night he dreamed about her, but she always seemed to be just beyond his grasp.

The next day Jack got up and robotically went about getting ready. At 7:35, he stood in front of the door with his briefcase full of meaningless lesson plans and student reports. It seemed to get harder with time, having to walk through that door that erased all his memories and deposited him, a second later, back in the same place and hours later. Finally, he sighed and stepped forward…

…Jack Simons emerged from the model house attached to Northcross Prison and was immediately surrounded by guards. They took his briefcase and while they watched, he undressed and was handed an orange prison uniform.

Sub-Warden Neese, walked up to him with a tablet computer, shaking his head slightly.

“How did I do in there?” Jack asked.

“You got violent, Jack,” Neese said. “You tried to break a window with your chair. I was about to pull the program right there, but Sarah convinced me to let her call you and calm you down. You’re not doing well, Jack.”

“It’s not fair, though!” Jack said. “If you would just let me know what was going on, I’d behave for you. I’d be as good as gold.”

“You know why we can’t do that, Jack. Of course you can play nice for a while. What we are trying to determine is if you are a fundamentally dangerous and unstable person. I’ll see you back here in ten hours.”

“It’s all bull, if you ask me,” Jack’s cellmate, Chris Jamer said. They were lying on their bunks, staring at the ceiling. “Who wouldn’t get anxious and violent in a place like that, where they don’t tell you anything? They’re trying to get you to fail.”

“I have to try to get another message through to myself,” Jack said.

“Man, you know they said they would cancel the whole program if they caught you doing that again.”

“I’m going to fail anyway,” Jack said. “They said Sarah phoned me in there. I wonder if I recognized her voice. I gotta do this for her.”

“If you get caught trying to sneak another message in to yourself, you’ll never see her again,” Chris said. “You were lucky enough to be chosen for that program. Don’t screw it up now.”

“Give me your razor. I’ll make it small and put it between my fingers. They’ve never checked there yet.”

“You’re a fool, Jack,” Chris said, but he reached under his mattress and pulled out a tiny razor blade and handed it to Jack.

At 5:00, the guards came for Jack. They led him to a staging area where he undressed fully and stood naked while the guards checked him for contraband and messages.

“Arms up.” He raised his arms. “Fingers spread. I said, fingers spread!” One of the guards seized Jack’s ring finger. He looked at it for a second, then gave a harsh laugh and threw the hand down. “I didn’t see nothing,” he said in a low tone, “but you’d better follow your own advice in there, cuz after today, you’ll never see the inside of that house again, if you don’t.”

Jack got dressed in his teacher clothes and was handed his briefcase. Then he walked through the door and into the house…

The Woman in Blue, Part 3

4 Comments | tags: experiment, fiction, memory loss, prison, prisoner, science fiction | posted in Dusk

July 2, 2012

The Woman in Blue, Part 1 of 3

By David Stewart

The first thing Jack Simons remembered was walking into his living room. He stopped and looked back down the short hall that led to the heavy wooden door behind him. He gotten there somehow but could remember nothing about it. After a moment, of confused indecision, he walked back and opened the door…

…and walked back into the living room. Again, he could remember nothing about being outside—it was as if he had jumped forward in time. He was carrying a briefcase that when he opened it, was filled with lesson plans and student assignments. It seemed as if he were a teacher, but it was terrifying that he could not remember where he worked or even what he taught.

He could not even remember the house he was standing in. It seemed spacious beyond his price range, with large, hermetically-sealed windows that looked out onto a narrow lawn, bordered by tall hedges that blocked all further view. The living room furniture was all modern and shiny; he had definitely not picked it out himself. A quick search of the rest of the house revealed a bedroom with a new bed, but his own clothes in the drawers, and a bathroom with his brands of toothpaste and shampoo, all in unopened containers. The kitchen was stocked with everything he normally ate, all in new and unopened packages.

At the other end of the house was another door that looked like the front door. It was locked by some method that bypassed the key and deadbolt. The window next to it looked out onto a front lawn that was also surrounded by a high hedge and a high gate he could not see over.

In the living room on a side table was a laptop, open and logged on to a chat program. The only contact was someone named Sarah. The icon was a gorgeous woman in blue dress. Jack reached over and typed, one-fingered: Hi.

Hi Jack. The reply came almost immediately, as if someone had been waiting for him.

He sat down at the table. Who are you?

I’m Sarah. How do you like the house?

It’s fine, but it’s not mine. Where am I?

You’re in your new home, at least for now. You are part of an experiment in memory, which is why you don’t remember anything beyond a few moments ago. Don’t worry, you volunteered for it.

I don’t remember volunteering for any experiment, Jack wrote.

Duh. 🙂

The familiarity of the reply caused a flash of anger in Jack, but he restrained it. He typed, Just tell me when I can leave.

The experiment will last a few weeks at most. Don’t worry, you have the permission of your principal and school. I know it will probably be hard, but you won’t be able to remember what you do outside and when you’re outside, you won’t remember what you do here.

So you split me into two people, then.

Sort of. It may be difficult, but please remember, you volunteered for this, so follow the rules. Don’t write notes to yourself. Your principal assures me you will never need to bring work home.

So what am I supposed to do? Jack asked.

Whatever you’d like. We provided a selection of books that you requested and the TV is programmed to all your favorite channels. Anything else you need, you can pick up when you go out tomorrow.

So, I’m a prisoner?

There was a slight pause. You can leave at any time. You just won’t remember it when you return.

Do I know you, out there? Who are you?

Just call me Sarah.

The next day the alarm rang at 6:00. Jack considered not getting up. It was hard to worry about a job he could not even remember. Eventually, though, he got up, showered and got dressed. He left the house at 7:30, his briefcase in hand…

…and walked into the house. The clock on the living room wall said 5:22 and he felt tired. The house was as silent as before. He had logged off from the chat with Sarah the night before and turned off the computer, but now it was on again and logged into the chat window.

There was a small pain, lurking somewhere in the back of his mind. As soon as it came into his conscious mind, he realized it was coming from his right armpit. He rubbed at it, but it did not go away. Finally, he went into the bedroom and took off his shirt, wondering if a bee had crawled into his clothes and stung him.

On his side, just below his armpit was a series of tiny red lines that looked as if they had been cut with a razor. They seemed to form letters, but the whole area was red and swollen. He pressed on it, forcing the blood away from the skin and suddenly the red lines stood out. Cameras.

Cameras? Was this a message from himself on the outside? He felt a chill run through him. Sarah had said he could not send messages to himself. Jack looked around and quickly put his arm down.

He went downstairs to the computer. Are you there? he typed.

Yes, Jack. I’m here. How are you feeling today?

How would I know? Listen, are there cameras in this house? Are you spying on me?

There was a pause of half a minute and Jack could see that she started to type and then stopped several times.

Yes, there are some cameras there, just to monitor you for the experiment. You knew there would be when you signed up for this.

Maybe the me out there knew, but you could have told the me in here. Are you’re watching me while I take a piss?

No, there are no cameras in the bathroom. We respect your privacy.

Yeah, sure they did, he thought. They put him in a bugged house and left out the bathroom for the sake of his privacy? He went into the bathroom and flipped his middle finger at the mirror, the light and anywhere else he thought could hide a camera. Then he went back to the computer.

Did you see that?

See what, Jack?

Yeah, right. Suddenly everything that she said seemed sinister. He looked around the room and then slammed the laptop shut.

The Woman in Blue, Part 2

8 Comments | tags: experiment, fiction, memory loss, science fiction | posted in Dusk

June 28, 2012

Three Writers on a Bus

By David Stewart

A group of friends, Mike, Tom, and Kelsey were traveling to a writers’ meeting when there was an accident. Here are their accounts of the incident.

Mike’s Account

It was raining—not a happy little drizzle, but a carwash set to Super Premium, hold the hot wax. We were traveling down a lonely highway halfway between Nowhere and Who Cares City and had been for over two hours now.

I was doing a crossword puzzle and failing miserably at it. Who the hell knew a 7-letter word for domicile goatee anyway? The broad across the aisle had been giving me the sweet-eye for an hour now and I kept giving it right back. She had legs like the Amazon River: long, with lots of curves.

I glanced out the window and saw a car was coming up on us, like it wanted to make our acquaintance in a hurry. The passenger side window went down a crack and the barrel of a snub-nosed Luger told me they didn’t want to chat. The bus driver—O’Malley, by his nametag—saw it too and threw the wheel to the left, trying to give the other vehicle the old cold-steel shoulder. The car swerved but O’Malley kept right with him. The front fenders scraped with a shriek of steel like the devil’s nails going down Hell’s blackboard.

There was a boom as the Luger fired, hitting our front wheel. O’Malley did his damndest to pull it back under control, but the bus tipped and started to roll. The Amazon across the aisle fell into my lap. I put an arm around her waist and held on as passengers and baggage got thrown hither and yon. I knew I was probably going to die, but what a way to go.

Tom’s Account

The Imperion-class space frigate, Reyhoun, rocketed down the warp-path towards the Orion nebula. Captain Dax Harflux piloted the 800-ton frigate with cool confidence that came with eight years of experience in the Galactic Commonwealth. This was his last trip of the cycle, transporting dignitaries and Fagullian wine to the nebula colonies.

A beeping sounded from his instrument panel. Holy meteors! A Narullion pirate craft had been detected 40km behind them and coming up fast. He had to evade it, but how? He was locked into following the warp-path until he hit the nebula jump-gate. He accelerated, sending sparks of anti-matter shooting from his proton-powered nacelles.

The Narullion pirate was approaching rapidly on his port side, firing crackling beams of scarlet energy. Captain Dax strengthened the shields but they had already lost half their power. Another beam hit and the ship lurched to one side. The pirates had gotten the gravity generators and inertial dampeners! The whole ship started to roll and with a burst of white light, they flew off the warp-path. With his last burst of energy, Captain Dax hit the emergency distress button. He might die with his ship, but the pirates could never get their filthy hands on the dignitaries or his cargo of Fagullian wine!

Kelsey’s Account

I sat listlessly by the window and watched the rain glisten down the glass. Today was the one-year anniversary of my beloved being killed in action but my heart still yearned for his gentle touch and the feel of his strong arms around me. Life had been drained of color since I had watched him leave for basic training in a bus much like this one.

There was a flash of yellow next to the bus and I saw a convertible pull up next to the bus and stay there. I was seated directly behind the bus driver and I saw him slow to let the slick sports car pass, but still it stayed with us.

Then to my astonishment, the convertible’s roof began to retract and a man stood up in the passenger’s seat. He was wearing a battered Army uniform but his head was bare and the rain soaked his soft brown locks in seconds. I let out a gasp as I saw that it looked like my beloved.

He smiled and I knew it was him. That smile, even seen through a rainy bus window going 50 miles an hour, still filled me with chills. I did not know how, but it was he, back from the dead. I flung open the bus window and leaned out, heedless of the rain and extreme danger.

“My dearest love!” he cried, “I have come back for you. Not even death can keep me from your side!”

“But how?” I shouted back in wonder and joy. “They told me you had been killed at Dieppe. I received a telegram.”

“A clerical error!” he shouted joyfully again.

I let out a sigh. Clerical error. From then on, those two simple words would be the happiest words in the English language for me.

He pulled a box out of his pocket and opened it, proffering the contents. “Would you do the honor of marrying me?” he shouted.

I fear that I fainted at that point and, it seems, collapsed onto the bus driver. With my last sensation, I felt the bus swerve and then I was thrown into weightlessness, like an angel settling gently to Earth.

I woke up in the hospital, with my beloved sitting next to me, a diamond ring on my finger. Oh, but I was the happiest woman in the world!

Bergerville Herald, June 20, 2012

A Greyhound bus traveling westward on highway 16 side-swiped a car, hit the curb and rolled once. The cause of the crash is said to be mechanical. Nine people were treated for minor injuries at the Bergerville Central Hospital.

10 Comments | tags: accident, bus, fiction, funny, noir, parody, romance, science fiction, writers | posted in Light

June 25, 2012

When Opposites Attract…Like Matter and Anti-Matter

By David Stewart

Back when I lived in Vermont, I knew a married couple called the Harringtons. They loved each other, as far as I could tell, but when it came to their genetic thermostats, they were like black and white.

Mr. Harrington always ran cold; his hands were as chill and clammy as a dead fish and he wore sweaters up into late spring. Mrs. Harrington, on the other hand, could melt icicles just by pointing at them. She was constantly flushed and sweating. I once saw her walking in a blizzard in short sleeves and she was still red in the face.

It turns out that Mrs. Harrington liked to sleep with the covers on, even though she was always hot. Something about the air on her skin made her feel violated, she said. As you can imagine, summer was hellish for her, and as the temperature rose, she kept the air conditioning on more and more. Little did Mr. Harrington know that his wife had hooked up an extra tank of super-powered Freon to the unit. She had bought it from a Russian spam email and it was apparently not intended for home use.

The first night she used it, the temperature in the bedroom fell to below freezing and icicles starting forming on the drapes. Mrs. Harrington slept like a baby, only waking up from the crash of Mr. Harrington falling on the floor in hypothermic convulsions. To this day, he remains the only case of July hypothermia in Vermont history.

Of course, it didn’t help that Mr. Harrington couldn’t sleep with the covers on. He felt like he was being suffocated and woke up hourly, screaming about being buried alive. As you can imagine, winter was a living hell for him, if hell indeed froze over. He would crank the heat as high as it would go until the Harringtons’ gas bill rivaled the GDP of a very, very small country. The gas company had one whole department dedicated to the Harrington account.

With an Exxon Valdez-worth of natural gas pouring into their house every day, Mr. Harrington could finally get comfortable and sleep through the night, but Mrs. Harrington, on the other hand, was experiencing a much more classical picture of Hell. After she was rushed to the hospital in January and treated for heat stroke, the Harringtons knew that something had to change.

They didn’t want to divorce and the idea of separate bedrooms seemed lonely and the quitter’s way out. One day, Mrs. Harrington found a revolutionary type of bed on E-bay. It allowed each side of the bed to regulate its temperature separately by dividing it with a high-pressure air curtain. Mrs. Harrington clicked Buy it Now without even looking at the price.

The bed was sealed and pressurized inside a big glass box. It worked like a charm: Mr. Harrington could turn the heat up all he wanted and Mrs. Harrington could cool her side down until she could see her breath. The first night they used it, they found that it worked too well. As the temperature difference between the two sides of the bed approached eighty degrees, mini storm fronts broke out along the dividing line. A tiny hurricane swept the length of the bed around 4am, pelting them with a thimble full of rain. Still, neither one wanted to stop using it.

“Giving up on this bed would be taking the quitter’s way out,” Mr. Harrington said.

“Plus, it’s non-refundable,” Mrs. Harrington added.

So, now the couple dresses in their rain-slicker pajamas every night and Mrs. Harrington puts on her sleep mask with the small umbrella attached. Mr. Harrington swears that the tiny lightning bolts don’t even wake him up anymore and that the thunderclaps are as soothing as a kitten’s snore.

It wasn’t easy to adjust, but it was a compromise, and isn’t that what marriage is all about?

6 Comments | tags: apartment, couple, fiction, funny, marriage, problems | posted in Light

June 21, 2012

Caves for Rent – Inquire Within

By David Stewart

“Ugh, I feel like a zombie,” my wife said, crashing facedown onto the bed.

“Nonsense,” I said, surreptitiously checking her skin for a greyish pallor. She had been saying that sort of thing for about a week now and although I never truly believed her, I kept a baseball bat by my side of the bed.

“I’m just so tired. I never get enough sleep. I just wish there was a cave I could crawl into and sleep for a month.”

I’ve never been really big on metaphors, so I googled “caves for rent”. There were a surprisingly large numbers of results: some absurd, some merely expensive. To narrow it down, I typed, “just a cave to sleep in for a month”. One result came up.

ARE YOU TIRED OF TOO MUCH LIGHT? WANT TO HIDE FROM DEBT COLLECTORS?

TRYING TO NURTURE YOUR INNER TROGLODYTE?

SLEEPY BEAR CAVE RESORTS HAS IT ALL!!!!!

I wasn’t sure what a troglodyte was, but the ad sounded enthusiastic and anyone who used five exclamations points in a row had to be sincere. I called the number.

A week later, I packed my wife’s bag while she was in the bathroom and told her we were taking a ride. She wouldn’t get in the car until I gave her some explanation, so I said we were going for ice cream. Then I felt like a jerk, so I really did stop and got some. We were almost finished our cones when we pulled up to the cave I had rented. It was just a dark hole coming out of the side of a hill with a steel door inset into the entrance.“What’s this?” she asked. “Are you going to kill me and throw my body in a cave?”

“Surprise!” I said and then had to explain I wasn’t referring to killing her.

“So . . . you’re going to lock me in a dark hole?” she asked hesitantly.

“Well . . . yeah, but not in those exact words. I rented you a cave. You said you wanted to sleep in a cave for a month. I booked it for a month, but they threw in an extra week free. Food’s provided and there’s—I checked the brochure I had pushed up my sleeve—natural air conditioning.”

“So . . . you want to lock me in a dark cave all by myself for five weeks?” I couldn’t interpret the expression on her face, but my confidence in the merits of my plan was beginning to be shaken; even more so when I saw tears forming in her eyes.

“Well, honey, you know—”

“Thank you!” she cried. “Thank you so, so much! I love you.” She threw her arms around me, gave me a quick kiss and then ran off towards the cave entrance, suitcase in hand. She pulled the huge steel door shut and it made a loud clang as it locked.

I got back into the car with a self-satisfied smile. Now it was just me for five weeks, just like when I was a bachelor.

Uh, I guess I’ll have to cook for myself. Well, no getting around that. I liked ramen.

And do the laundry and dishes. Ugh. Maybe I could make a big pile for five weeks.

No sex for five weeks. Dang. Dang, dang, dang.

I jumped out of the car and pounded on the door of the cave. “Hey, honey! I was thinking, why don’t we put up dark curtains in the bedroom. I can try to snore less . . . sometimes. Honey?”

There was no answer. I turned and sadly got back in the car.

9 Comments | tags: caves, fiction, funny, vacation | posted in Light

June 18, 2012

The Long Ride Home

By David Stewart

The darkness enveloped me on all sides like a shroud of fear. Leaves, twisting and shuddering in the night breeze, fled across my path as I steered my bike down the quickly darkening lane. Streetlights gleamed periodically through the gloom. It was becoming foggy.

Strange, I thought. They said that fog almost never appeared in that area. In fact, it was the first time I had ever seen fog this thick and cold. A sense of panic crept over me with clutching fingers as the mist settled around me. My bike was already dripping with condensation and I was damp from the fog and an anxious sweat. My hands were becoming numb from the wet steel handlebars and I was getting tired.

The turnoff to my driveway should be somewhere up ahead. It was taking longer than I had remembered. Maybe I had already passed it, obscured by trees, darkness and the mist that now blanketed everything. I had only lived in the area for two weeks and I had never gone much farther down the lane beyond my house. Something had always restrained me, a small tugging in my heart to do something else that had always seemed more important.

Suddenly, as if pulled by a preternatural sense, I turned to see two small points of light piercing the gloom some ways behind me. Headlights. An irrational terror seized me, as if those lights were the roving eyes of a beast that was searching me out. I looked wildly for a place to hide, to escape. The trees seemed to draw closer to the sides of the road, blocking any passage through them. Retreat was out of the question. The only way was forward. If only I could reach my driveway before those lights overtook me. I slammed the bike into a higher gear and started to pedal harder. The sleek frame sped along the slick asphalt.

I was being silly, I realized. The headlights behind me most likely belonged to a farmer, driving home from the store. I started to slow my pace until I looked back at the lights again, much closer now. Those pale, unrelenting beams bored straight into my mind, melting all logic and rational thought as they went. Adrenaline flooded my veins and again I was off like a shot. My muscles were aching and I was dragging in breaths in ragged gasps.

The car was closing fast; my last burst of energy had made little difference. At any moment it might overtake me. Then, at the last moment, it appeared: my driveway, like a tunnel in the trees on the right. The brakes let out an indignant shriek from the water, and gravel flew as I skidded recklessly into the driveway seconds before the car roared past. I took a deep breath and turned to go up to the house.

With a start, I noticed for the first time the tall iron-wrought gate that now barred my way. Beyond it, row upon row upon countless row of bone-white gravestones rose like broken teeth out of the fog.

This was not my driveway.

9 Comments | tags: bike, creepy, fear, fiction, fog, ride | posted in Dusk

June 14, 2012

Ants Go Squishie!

By David Stewart

Leroy put down his toothbrush and watched a column of ants brave their way up to the summit of his bathroom faucet. They reached the top and milled around a little, slipping off to a watery demise in the sink below or trying to make their way back down to the counter. On the counter, another group seemed to be making a base camp around his mouthwash bottle.

Leroy hated ants, but lately he had given up. What was the point? He couldn’t kill them all and when he killed them they left messy smears everywhere. He had put down poison, but it had been roach poison, and apparently ants were stronger than roaches.

He went out and shut the bathroom door in an attempt to keep the invaders contained. As he walked outside, all he could think of was some way to kill the ants. The air was hot and near his building was a new street vendor. A huge sign read “Mango Slushies”.

“Hey buddy, get a free mango slushie!” the red-headed twenty-something behind the cart yelled. He even wore a slushie-looking grin. “Today only!”

How to kill the ants…how to kill the ants. Leroy’s mind was filled to capacity, trying to think of a solution.

“Don’t you want a free drink? Hey buddy, I’m talking to you.” Leroy kept walking, trying to block out the annoying noise.

“Yeah, keep walking, jerk!” the slushie guy yelled finally. “Ignore the best thing that will happen to you all day. It would probably poison you anyway.”

Poison.

Leroy stopped. He turned around. “Did you say poison?”

The red-headed boy suddenly looked uncertain. “Yeah, I said it would poison you, probably.”

“Would this stuff poison ants?”

The boy gave a short laugh of disbelief. “Uh, yeah, sure. Why not. I’m sure it would explode their little heads.” With an effort, he pulled the grin back from the corners of his mouth.

Leroy gave him a long look. “Okay, I’ll take three.”

“Well, only one is free—”

“Then I’ll buy two more. How big are they?”

“Uh, they’re a liter each.”

“Sounds good. Can I get them to go?”

So it was that Leroy walked away a moment later with three huge plastic cups of mango slushie, perilously stretching out the plastic bag the boy had put them in. Leroy walked back up to his apartment and opened the bathroom door. The ants had scaled his small shaving shelf and had discovered half a sandwich Leroy had forgotten the night before when he had gone in to use the bathroom. They were busy disassembling it and belaying it down to waiting sandwich sherpas below. Leroy took it and put it in the tub, plugged the drain and waited for a crowd to form.

“See you in insect hell,” Leroy said, and poured all three liters of mango slushie into the tub, pausing only to shudder at the idea of seeing anything in insect hell.

The ants went crazy. Leroy shut the bathroom door to let the poison do its work.

Between work and going out afterwards with the guys, Leroy did not have an occasion to open the bathroom door until the next morning. He pushed it open a crack and peaked in.

The walls and sides of the tub were black with ants, but his elation soon crashed when he saw that they were still moving. Not only were they moving, they were busy. It looked as if thousands of ants had drowned in the slushie, but tens of thousands more were pouring down into the tub in ordered lines to drink at the shore of the slushie lake. They had apparently gotten into his toothpicks and dental floss and several tiny rafts were floating on the sticky yellow surface. He watched several ants float by in the cap of his toothpaste tube. He stared in dazed disbelief for several seconds before giving the whole thing a miss and shutting the door again.

He spent the rest of the day moping around the apartment and avoiding the bathroom. It felt eerily quiet. Outside of the bathroom, there was not a single ant in the rest of the house. When he went to check the mail, he heard other people in the building commenting on the sudden lack of ants and praising the landlord. He felt slightly cheated by this and printed up signs that read:

ANTS SUDDENLY ALL GONE? THANK LEROY GOOGLEHEIM IN APT. 5F! Several people did thank him and asked his secret.

“Special poison,” he said.

The only thing that was worrying Leroy now was the idea of the slushie in the bathtub running out. In his uneducated guess, there were now several hundred thousand ants in his bathroom, glutting themselves on mango-flavored slushie goo. If that were to run out, there would be a veritable wave of 6-legged sugar freaks rampaging around looking for their next fix. He went to visit the slushie cart.

“I need more of that slushie stuff,” he said. “A lot more.” It was only then that he noticed the red-headed slushie guy packing up the cart. “Where are you going?”

“I’m out of business,” the boy said. “It turns out I wasn’t far wrong when I said these were poison. The yellow dye— it causes cancer in lab rats. Are you feeling okay, by the way? You had an awful lot of that stuff.”

“Just peachy,” Leroy said quickly. “Listen, where is the rest of the slushie mix?”

“I guess I’m going to throw it all away,” the boy said sadly. “I couldn’t pay people to take it now.”

“That’s not true,” Leroy said. “You can pay me. You can give me ten bucks for the whole lot.”

Ten minutes later, Leroy was in possession of forty gallons of concentrated slushie mixture and ten bucks. He dragged the plastic jugs to the roof of the building and rigged up a tube that he fed down through his bathroom vent. A little adjusting and he could refill the tub without ever going into the bathroom again.

He sealed the bathroom door with duct tape and fervent prayers and abandoned it. As the days went by, people from buildings all around the neighborhood were dropping by to congratulate him on fixing the ant problem. He even got a commendation from the mayor and the title of official Neighborhood Ant Exterminator.

The only bad part was that now he had to use the bathroom in the McDonalds down the street.

9 Comments | tags: ants, apartment, fiction, funny | posted in Light

June 11, 2012

Mayor Jim

By David Stewart

I don’t know anyone in our town who can pronounce our mayor’s last name. The sign by his office reads Jim Mxyhunlln. When I first saw it, I thought the printer had had a stroke and smashed his head on the keyboard. The thing is, our mayor is an alien, and I don’t mean he’s from Europe. Not that I know where he’s from, but he has baby-blue skin, four arms and a long jagged tongue. He’s a really nice guy though.

I’m proud of our town for being open and multi-cultural in its public officials and I don’t have any complaints whatsoever about Mayor Jim. The only reason I’m writing this is that our town’s in a wee bit of trouble. Well, it’s more like an interstellar war and in case there’s nothing left here next week but glowing ash, I thought it would be good to let someone out there know what was going on.

Mayor Jim, God bless him, arrived in town one day and almost immediately opened up a deli. He didn’t get much business at first, because people didn’t really know what to think of him and they weren’t sure what was in the pepperoni. But after a while he kind of grew on everyone. He had this nice little way of looking at you that just made you want to go into his shop and buy twelve pounds of bratwurst and a wheel of Gorgonzola cheese, and then vote for him for mayor. Which is weird, because at that point he wasn’t even running.

Good old Jim made such an impression on everyone that soon people were just lining up in front of his shop to buy things at his deli. He once ran out of supplies and it still didn’t matter. They must have liked Jim pretty well, since they’d just go up, put money on the counter and then walk away. He really knew how to touch people’s hearts and minds.

This went on for about a year or so until the time came for the mayoral elections. The guy before Jim was Mayor Harold Harper, who had been the mayor here for as long as I could remember. He ran again, but after Jim announced his candidacy, there wasn’t much doubt as to who would win. It was a landslide, to say the least. I think even Mayor Harper voted for Jim.

Our little town held a parade for the newly-elected Mayor Jim the very next day, we were all so happy to have him leading us. There was a bit of a shock the next week when Mayor Jim started appointing his new town council. For one thing, everyone was under the impression that the town councilors were elected, but Jim said no, and that was good enough for us. It sure was an interesting crowd that started showing up and moving into the Town Hall offices. The town clerk was a spiky little guy that smelled a bit like feet. The director of the Housing Committee was a floating cloud of metallic dust and the director of the War Committee (who knew?) looked like a cross between a wombat and a bad day.

Not that anyone was complaining, of course. We were just enthralled by the whole group of them and especially by Mayor Jim. For one thing, he wiped out unemployment in the town in one stroke. Mayor Jim selected everyone without a job to build, and then work in, his massive factory. After a while, we experienced something that Mayor Jim called “negative unemployment” which sounded pretty good. Turns out that it meant a lot of other businesses were closed to free up people to work in the factory. I even worked there for a while. I’m not sure what the pay was like but the morale was sky-high and there was as much free pepperoni as you could eat.

We never did find out what the factory produced because the first thing we made was a machine that put all the pieces together at the end of the line. Whatever it was though, it made someone somewhere pretty mad. The whole town was woken up one night by a massive boom that shook the houses. The next day the factory was gone, with nothing left but a smoking hole and tiny scraps of processed meat.

Mayor Jim got down to business after that and we were glad to see that he was fighting for our town. Lots of big weapons and a whole legion of grey-skinned guards appeared out of nowhere, but they helped me sleep easier at night, knowing that Mayor Jim had our backs. In the evenings, we’d go up on the roof and watch the laser beams arcing up into space. Every so often there would be a bloom of orange fire and we’d all cheer, because we knew that there was one less bad guy to attack our town. Even when the laser gun accidentally shot down a satellite and knocked out our TV, we didn’t mind.

That’s what life has been like here lately. There’s a lot of talk about “hyper-radioactive dispersion” which is a little troubling although Mayor Jim assures us there are suits that can stop it. He and the town council wear them everywhere and I breathe easier knowing they are safe.

Seriously, I don’t know where we would be without Mayor Jim. He’s such a talented guy and he cares about each and every one of his citizens. I know because he can read our thoughts and he tells us every night. He knows I’m writing this, of course, but I’m sure that’s fine with him, because he’s just that kind of guy.

If you read this message, just remember there’s no need to intervene or come anywhere near our little beleaguered town. Mayor Jim has everything here under control.

9 Comments | tags: aliens, fiction, mind-control, quirky, science fiction | posted in Light

June 10, 2012

Come Enter the Green-Walled Tower…

By David Stewart

The Green-Walled Tower is the name of the second part in my three-in-one story, The Celestial Duet. It is an old tower where an alchemist once looked into a glass and not only saw other worlds, but also bridged the gap between them.

That is what I hope this blog to be. I hope it will a place where we can peer into other worlds and other realities and sometimes even, cross over into them. So come with me through the old wooden door, up the winding stone steps and into the upper chamber, to the large, dark glass in the middle of the room. Come look in and let us see what appears.