mission impossible

Through the visor the astronaut could make out vague shapes in the distance – ahead a structure towered, but he was fatigued from the journey and needed to rest a moment. He walked on the street, it was a narrow avenue, and came to the one door that stood out from many. There was a mark on the door, and the astronaut knocked upon it.

“What do you want, can't you see? I'm dressed for dinner.” Behind the man behind the door was a woman in red, and climbing upon her back was a small girl, or perhaps a monkey in a dress. The astronaut couldn't see well behind his visor.

He raised an arm, longed to feel the thread, but felt the impeding stranger behind the door glowering through his mask, the scene was harassed by the sun visor.

> “Might I remove my helmet?” The resulting motions and colors could, should probably, blind the astronaut, the caustic air might choke him, but his fingers inside his gloves itched and he struggled with the bolts on his helmet.

“You fool. Come inside and sit in the bathtub.” The well dressed man set aside his pork chop, then bade his wife and monkeychild to lean against the wall. They disappeared into the camouflage swales and buttes of the wallpaper.

> The astronaut was led through a maze of halls, and came upon a glorious toilet, a veritable spa. A polyhedron construct on wheels hovered in the corner, covered in tin foil. “You have my moonwalker,” he said, but he had lost the keys.

> The man turned on a fan and then an ultraviolet light. “The women have gone out into the yard, they are sitting under a shade awning and peeling butterflies.” He closed the door.

> Taking this for a sign, the astronaut clumsily removed his helmet and let it drop to the tile floor, then he held his breath and waited to die. He scrunched his eyes shut and thought about his wife, so many hundreds of miles away, and how she drew upon the walls, and grew tumbleweeds for the garden. They would put a cloth upon the table and sometimes sit naked on it. She wore lipstick and longed to live among the birds. Strangers averted their eyes, fearing their repertoire, and they cavorted stopping only to write letters. Then he was chosen, and whisped away.

> The astronaut found he could breath, and finally he looked out of the window, but the woman and her child had left the shade and only a large hairy ape remained and was menacing a woman on the ground. Her clothes were torn, he had seen it before and turned to the door.

This room was no place to be, it suffocated the astronaut. He removed his spacesuit taking with him only a utility belt and tried the door handle. It was unlocked, outside on a chair a girl sat reading the morning paper but she didn't look up, only said “have a nice day.”

> It was a shame, he thought, that he would have to die today, in a strange place. The astronaut had taken a bath towel and wrapped it around his head. With a screwdriver he drove holes through the cloth and left only a blind of small threads to fall over his eyes. The air burned and sucked the moisture from his eyes and he blanched under the towel. He couldn't find a passage out, so the astronaut loaded his lazer with long shards of electricity and blasted a hole down the breadth of the house, then stumbled through the devastation. The last room he passed contained headless bodies that pumped blood, spurting onto the floor and tables. He slipped, but a large hole led to the outer wall, and he escaped.

> Beyond the street loomed a tower, he could see it now, the obstructing helmet lay on the cold tile behind him. His eyes burned, the astronaut felt them slowly melting. His skin felt loose, but he needed to keep moving. To the tower.

People in the streets were running with flags, he almost tripped on a mustache, a child ran with a machine gun and screamed Veritas, Veritas in a high pitched voice. He wanted to strangle the running boy, but then lips hovered over his ear, the sweet voice of his wife so far away, and she calmed him and put images of painted hands, floating breasts, splashing into his mind's eye. For a moment he stood taller, but the tiny lizards began creeping up his socks, and the astronaut had to flee, lest a stasis should take him to dissolves his bones in a bath of brine and the scythe of a toothy grimace.

Finally he came upon the square, stepping over the prone bodies of men and women that littered the cobbles. The tower rose ahead, but the only way to gain entry was through a vast orifice that throbbed in his path. There was nothing for it, but to struggle forward, and he pierced the gobbling membrane with a lance and blundered through. Inside the air was if anything more foul, but his skin was coated in a slime that soothed and his watering eyes blinked rapidly. The scales began to shed and the astronaut could see clearly again. He unwrapped the towel and tied it to his waist, looking up and seeing the tower rise into the cloudscape. Though his muscles ached, he jumped forward, feeling the utility belt bang against his leg, and grasped a rung.

> The astronaut had trouble thinking, but his training took over. The tactics had been forced onto him over a period a months, he performed endless tasks over and over again. Now his undertaking was to climb, one hand over the other, for as long as it took. If he could, he must reach the summit. An appliance in his belt felt the change in altitude and a needle protruded into his leg. The astronaut winced, but carried on.

At the first level he stopped for a moment. A small aircraft had crashed here and a woman was laying on the metal deck of the platform, sitting up out of her skin. She had failed, but he was still alive. He leaned over into the cockpit and found several vials of Q serum laying on the floor. Only one was unopened, and he unscrewed the lid and drank the purplish fluid inside. He hoped it would suffice, and then went back to the ladder. The astronaut climbed.

> In the gloom that pervaded he saw his wife, she washed her long black hair, was toweling it slowly. That day they reclined in their bed, then laid a dog skin rug at the foot of the mountain and made friends with dark neighbors. A man from the park office showed them how to transplant red organs and they practiced. It was fun. Their heads almost split from the knowledge; the astronaut became lethargic and his body felt like the bust of a Roman god. Legless, armless, crumbling and noseless. He came to the third landing and crawled up, found a metal arm and leaned upon it.

> The astronaut looked into his utility belt, but there was nothing in it but a spent lazer and a screwdriver that he longed to plunge into his heart, the bloody organ he had traded for his wife's. It beat and reminded him, but the day was done. A latticework of filaments upon his chest throbbed and cursed, but no training could prevent the inevitable.

The astronaut slumped and then lay still, while the bubble burst and the sky opened, etching his worn body into a filigree upon the rusting iron scaffold.

deep

Come out of your tunnel, and taste the rain. These bleak, gastric undulations that pull you in, that you wander through unimpeded yet ducking – they keep you humble like an earthworm, like a troll hovering for a handout. Riches are not forthcoming, nothing will come your way but the pennies falling through cracks. Come out, let your back even out, crack those vertebrae, let the sun cauterize your rancid wounds, finger the dew that dribbles off the edge of a leaf. Every bend brings a weary new sameness. Every muted gray, feathered tendril of marauding root, crumb of obstreperous soil brings around a circular tangle of not again here we go and nothing ventured nothing gained. Hear the rain, climb up, and out, drown in the hard wet drops that want only to bash in your brains, tunnel into the lines of your diminishing face, puddle in your eyes. Taste it, and let the rain shape your dreams, then put your foot to the test, follow the rain running rivulets in the dirt and revel in the mud, it colors your world and rainbows shift in the folds of conquest.

embrace the night

In the office where the window is an afterthought, clothed in black shutting out the eve, hangs my painting of Oliver Dorman, eccentric. The office is stark, equipped only with a maple desk and chair. A bookshelf stands in the corner where a sliver of light from the open door leaks in. Upon this desk is a blank sheet of paper, and a pen that is all but empty of ink. It matters not. Oliver Dorman winces in his portrait, not fond of sitting the prerequisite length of time. He scrunches up his nose and pouts, but the artist paints over this grim affair with brush, gives his model an air of contempt and a glass for contemplation. If ever the door slams, the front door to this abode, the pen moves about; it is inching closer to the edge, off the page, nearer to the brink, ready to take the plunge. The worn wooden planks, scuffed below the four legged butt holder, lie cold over stretched beams and hard packed clay. Quiet they have lain for hours, even days, frigid and replete with tedium, anxious to receive any clue, a sign from above. Just a draft gives rise to a thought, places its icy finger on the page and lifts a corner, forging an intimate turn of phrase, and forgetting like a candle does, its flame dancing on a breeze that snuffs it and travels on. What little light remains evaporates, taking Oliver Dorman with it into the night, and blackness creeps in, filling at last the creaky floorboards, stopping them like glue and only the rafters speak now, in low tones bidding another day farewell; goodnight.

Willow's Ball !

Really, another year has gone by and it's time for the world, no, galactically famous Willow's Ball?!

I'm sooo compelled to attend, but this always ends so badly for me. Dinosaur Hand typically gets me in trouble; all of his pinching and grabbing invariably get me slapped or thrown through a plate glass window. My dates always turn up missing...usually they're in the wine cellar getting it on with someone famous or changing into a bat or something equally icky. Last year Dino drove into the Scioto and my Tuxedo of purple ash leaves washed away and I ended up handcuffed to the banister...

Ah, memories...

Well, my date this year was easy. First I thought to ask the Love Is girl, but as she is anatomically incorrect and there wouldn't be much chance of any wicked fun after the ball, I passed. I was introduced to this perfectly gorgeous pair of legs months ago by our lovely hostess, Willow. My wonderfully quiet date couldn't really say "No," so she'll be at my side all night. Dinosaur Hand will help me keep her close. She can go all night, so please feel free to cut in. I do need to get around to all of the other lovely ladies, though with all of the masks I doubt I'll know who I'm dancing with.

I couldn't decide what to dress as this year, as willow insists on a masked ball. I've got this crazy elephant head, and the trunk is great as it will hold a wine glass and leave the hands free for other stuff...but this being an election year I thought to stay away from anything even remotely political...Drinks and politics don't mix, and Glenn is always about with a sword or muskets...

My unicorn is still at the dry cleaners...

An empty Box on wheels is always a good idea...I guess my date could pull me around and feed me drinks and cookies through a hole.

I'm not good at the costume thing, or masks. I prefer to just be a rug,

 

or wear a paper bag over my head and tell bad jokes all night long,

or just put my fingers over my eyes.

In the end I've decided to come as an Octopus...that way my many hands will confuse the multitude of guests and nobody will be able to guess which one is Dinosaur Hand. He'll like that...a lot!

Okay, we're on our way...the drive isn't too long from Ft. Wayne, the weather is nice, and we're looking forward to seeing some of our best old bloggy friends, and some new ones as well. Look out for the red Tracker, possibly floating down the Scioto again, Cheers!

faith of evolution

A  progression of fools

from beginning to fall

rising to perfection, cream of the crop,

finally came into their own

set the rest standing on heads

crowns planted firmly in the sand

looking out from within

between scrub and leaf

a deluge of color into

the widest expanse of space -

stars, the heavens, knowledge

found in no stack of books.

They walk on legs

gilded in gait

skipping the pretense

losing sleep for a chance at greatness

then stare through blinking fits

organizing thoughts into

architectural achievement

and numbers, letters, birds and bees,

release, dearth, lust and exhibition.

At length they'll form a latticework

of bodies to step on,

climbing hand over foot

upwards, artistically,

breaking ecclesiastic doors into shards

of timber, salving slivers of distrust,

the one eye and feral breast,

to lay a framework upon the floor

stretching like the limbs of an Einstein tree

into unnamed domains of fractal dissonance.

No poetic manual, no force of eros

in the curve of mechanization,

will crop the frivolous digits

from their dance, and exposition.

Standing naked under the gaze

of puffing monkeys, monocled -

haloed by emissions -

they dissolve in a slurry of myth

contained under a glass

dissected

cataloged

diagrammed and set upon a pole

pinned like a moth

into the obscurity of presentation

and glam

until the nectar erupts

and the circle breaks

upon the stone, and wheel, and manacle.

Helloooo Fall

what do the flowers do, when the rest of us are asleep?

hey - everything in this shot is a weed that I picked from a field...interesting.

another partying flower. Never got the invite.

Guess what's at the end of this secret passageway...

Going into the dying season - packing up soon,
and getting out the sweaters. Anyone for hot cocoa
and a night out by the bonfire?

A feral bat hovers in-

trinsic with elaborate fuctions,

hence the color coded doo-

hickeys and feathered

glass spines screaming

expletives like didode e-

mitting colorfast

BURSTS! Marble crates

of plain brown wrappers

sent to wealthy ingenues

cure all, give rise to

sons of featherless mother

effervescing flipping

flying in the haze, rup-

tured ether, either/neither

that nor the other thing

wherein space infringes

giveth rise to bat-

master Spleen, inherent

feral bat in a cardboard

box, swelled with pre-

cipitatis slime mold

creation of hoary voice

moulders: Indeed!

ghost of exploration

No, yes. A simple equation for a normal day. It's either black or its white, or somewhere in between. Choose, decide. Take a stand or make a guess. It's not rocket science, is it? Will it come down to this, standing in a puddle of sweat, a gun to my head, making a life decision, dictating my will over the will of many?

She touches my arm, and leaves me here, alone. A soft, furtive glance, then less as her eyes fall and her eyelids flicker like house lights in a thunderstorm. She left me. I touch my arm, wrap my fingers around the flesh feeling the warmth of her caress fade. That was her goodbye, what comes next is not for her, but me alone. I know it, but am loathe to face it. Alone I must, and I turn.

I can remember little of the preceding days, maybe a week. They pulled me from my berth, yanked the wires from my shaved head and set me upright. It was hazy, coming up from my séance, and the figures were tall, strong, shoving me from place to place, cleaning, dressing. Without knowing how, I found myself reclining on a couch in a fresh robe, a cup of tea in my hand. Sipping, foam on my lip. Her back was to me, a slight hand shrugging aside a corner of the curtain and a shaft of light piercing my gaze. An amazing butterfly, dripping with viscosity and heartbreaking chromaticity, adorned her left shoulder blade, whence the linen sheet had had fallen from. She had one foot wrapped haphazardly behind an ankle and then her head tilted on a fine, porcelain neck to rest upon her shoulder. I heard a sigh, then she turned.

“Oh,” she said, seeing me seeing her. I set down the cup and wiped the back of my hand across my wet mouth. “So, are you with us now?” She pulled the sheet up and made her way to my couch, crossing in front then sitting down. As the lucidity returned, I remembered her, at least the memory of her. My assistant, handler, gopher and lifeline.

“You're like an old bag of bones,” she said. “Do you want me to cut your hair? It's getting...” she made a face. I probably needed a shave as well.

I studied her face, the raised eyebrow, and my gaze fell to the sheet that covered the butterfly tattoo. Its wings had been bright, fantastic, but its head was one of a small child, perhaps a porcelain doll. “Leave it,” I said, then reached out to her and flicked the sheet away from her shoulder. It fell off revealing white skin and the sheen of moisture. I felt like grasping her and twisting her body around to prove my memory correct. She pulled it back and jumped up.

“Get dressed,” she said as she crossed the room and disappeared through a doorway. She left me there, sitting, trying to recall her name.

–

My last memory was of her shrouded, we were in a foreign land and our communicators had frozen. Eliza...was her name. Here, in this place at least. With our goggles on the sentients here may as well have been twelve foot tall and naked, wearing the heads of an antiquate bestiary. We couldn't begin to know their intentions, having never seen or heard of them before, or since. Eliza toggled the randomizer and we reset to Home. I wondered for a moment if we would reach out again, across the immense divide. If we can, will we see them for what they are, or as a blur in a cloud of images?

“They're better off left alone,” she says, Eliza, coming into the room dressed now. She puts a foot up onto the coffee table and bends to tie up a shoe, then the next. Her hair flops loosely over her face but her fingers know the trick and have the boots laced up in seconds. “We've plenty of day left, gear up old man, we'll be on our way.” Eliza, all business. She's always been one for keeping on schedule.

I grab the unit she tosses at me and turn it in my hand. The lights are all blinkity. Holding it to my ear I thumb the slide and frown. “Did you do a diagnostic on this thing? What happened back there?” A downed com-unit could have meant our deaths. Thankfully the override had worked and brought us back. “Those...things. They were huge. Damn it,” I curse and snap the com onto my sash, but I leave it at that. It's done.

“The basement heads can't figure it out,” Eliza answers. It's moot. “Fuck it, their heads are screwed on backwards, you know that. Don't know a plug-in from ass. Put it out of your mind. We've work to do.”

“Cripes,” it's all clear to me now. We're the front line, expendable. I may be the lead, but Eliza's the crack and snap. “Okay bitch, let's go get ourselves murdered.” She just smiles, wickedly, and gives me the thumbs up. It's the same every time, a little 'welcome back, now pull yourself together' routine. We tether, remotely of course, and I toggle.

–

A swirl of lights, woman and her child, another mass of swirling lights. The show is synchronous, but in processing I try to discern the images; are the swirling lights identical? Is that possible? A woman, a bear – something like a bear – playing music, some creature exercising or operating machinery, more random women; some unclothed geometric shapes. They're red, a Gothic painting, cartoon birds, broken pipes spilling black ichor.....

There is no telling where the randomizer will land us. Eliza thinks the images that flood our bulging skulls are more subconscious then extraneous input. I'm not sure, but I lean toward the external. Either way, the impressions are beginning to mould my brain. Nothing strikes my fancy, but I concentrate and gravitate toward the red geometry. “Maybe,” whispers Eliza ethereally. A bank of clouds begin to part and I wave my symbolic hands through the mist. “Here we go,” I whisper and zero in. Eliza takes aim and shoots, feelers land and she hauls us in hand over hand. “Stand by for soft landing,” she chants, I laugh; there's never a soft landing. We're standing on a beach. My feet are dry but I feel the pressure of the lapping waves, sand slipping around my ankles, sucking the fine particles around my imprints into the swirling expanse. She's twenty yards away, laying face down in the surf.

“Eliza,” I cry out then surge forward, but even as I move I can see her pushing up from the wet sand and sucking in air. She shakes her head, whipping her hair, and the sand mixed with pulpy strands of vegetation flip away. I kneel into the beach and pull her up into a kneeling position. Eliza gasps.

And pushes me back. “Elucidate,” she barks. All business. Okay. Even as I pull the com-unit up I do a visual. There's nothing on the beach, but I can't see beyond the heavily vegetated dunes to our left. Eliza rolls onto her side and lays back into the sand. The waves gently lap at her suit, but that and our microsalve lotion protect us from any foreign particulates.

Nothing. “Obfuscate,” I say, getting a dirty look. “Alright, nothing according to sensor readings. Not within readable distance. We're alone.” I stand up and face the water. “It's an ocean,” I can see nothing but water fading to the horizon. Can smell the brine, hear the surf gently rolling in and out.

She pushes up to her elbows and puts out a hand. I pull Eliza up and she stamps on the sand. “It's no day on the beach, slugger.” Eliza makes notes on her com-unit. She looks up and I can see the beginnings of night as a dome of stars alight in the eastern quadrant. She holds up her com and it flashes, makes the computations. “We're nowhere,” she says, reading the result.

According to randomizer theory that's not possible. I say as much. “Give it time to cycle. We can't find nowhere from a distinct point,” and for sure we can't get somewhere from nowhere, not knowing left from right, up from down. Eliza snaps another picture. It would be quite something if we had somehow stumbled upon the unknown domain, and lived to tell.

Eliza wrinkles her brow and spits. “Those assholes pizzled these coms. When we get back I'll kick their balls through the roof of their mouth.”

Yeah. “I'm going to weave their intestines into a fruit basket and feed it to their syphilitic whore girlfriends,” I counter, but it doesn't help the situation. My com fares no better, and I set up a continuance field then strap it onto my sash. “The basic functions seem to work. More importantly, it's warping our forms to the environ,” so we won't seem out of place to indigents, not at first glance.

The light is fading now, rapidly, and we haven't begun to set up a perimeter. From 'nowhere' we can't exactly take flight. The randomizer could cook the coordinates further, make it even harder to backtrack. No, we'll have to bivouac and sort it all out in the morning. And as soon as the com-unit processes the grid we'll probably have a better idea of our surroundings, hopefully get some exploration notes. “We can't set up here. Com is computing, but not enough data yet. Doesn't quite have a handle on the tides yet...” Eliza taps at the screen.

Nothing for it. I move up the beach and lower myself against the dune. The grasses here are dry and rustle against my suit. I pull my cowl up and stretch out, then pat the sand at my side. “I saved a spot for you.”

–

I wake, half dreaming, expecting her to be snuggled in, close to my back. But I'm alone. The blankets are disheveled and my right arm aches from the pressures of my sleeping position. I sit up and stretch it out, rubbing out the pins ans needles. “Eliza,” I begin.

My eyes are adjusting to the light, but everything by the curtains appears as negative relief. Swinging my legs over the edge of the mattress I try to assimilate, rub my eyes and blink rapidly. I rise and move over to the couch; a cup of tea sits beside it on a little table, steam curling up off the swirling foam. Soon I find myself there, pressed into the cushions, staring down at my boots, a gloved hand wrapped around the mug.

Am I missing something here, my mind feels like hieroglyphics – I can't translate my surroundings. The door opens and someone walks in, but I can't tell her from the Madonna wearing a cape. The com on my belt squawks and I retrieve it.

“Wake up.” I feel a boot in my ribs and groan, but in an instant I'm sitting. Eliza pulls me to my feet, she's holding the randomizer, her thumb poised above the toggle. Around us meander a troupe of creatures, a motley bass-ackward conglomeration of hideous malformed beasts. Some kind of truncated limbs dangle from bulbous bodies, devoid of noticeable heads. They seem to lean down to sand, shuffling, snuffling grotesquely, while dribbling grit trickles and sputters out their asses. “Let's move out, slowly,” she leads me zigzagging through the wandering monsters. At least the continuance field is working properly – the things take no heed of us, probably mistaking us for more of the same.

The light of the rising sun is snaking through the grasses that sway over the rising dunes and Eliza leads me from the troupe. My com-unit is taking notes as I hold it behind our retreating backs. She is looking forward however, assessing the land ahead and to all sides. “Eliza, slow down,” I say, but feel as if I'm dawdling. She turns sharply and parts the vegetation in a sparse patch. My feet are leaden and I can't keep up. On all sides appear crystalline figures, mobile humanoids donning the headdress of familiar shapes. A womanly shape rises, her face obscured by a star-field of skin hugging plastic, small translucent ears poke through golden brows and wave like the feathered tresses of a night moth.

Suddenly we're surrounded, their costumes are so diverse our com can't engage. We stand alone in our human forms, naked to the eyes all around for what we are – strangers in a foreign land. Eliza toggles the switch.

–

Once again I am sitting on the couch, or one just like it. The cup in my hand is too hot, but I just now notice and quickly put the drink down, rubbing my scorched fingers together and softly cursing. A door opens and Syrus Flood comes in, takes the seat across the room and leans forward, the white coat falling open across his knees. He looks into my eyes.

“Daniel, are you ready to go on?” he asks. There is a com-unit on his belt.

I don't know if I can continue, even with a thousand soldiers pushing me from behind. I look around the room, begin to see shapes looking out at me from the folded curtains and shadows. Images of fire begin to cloud my senses, a girl kneeling in a field, beseeching the heavens. “Is that thing on?” I gesture to his sash where the randomizing blinks. Of course it's on... There's a fish floundering, tossed by currents, or is it a saucer floating in a palaver of galaxies? I'm reeling. Syrus opens his mouth and spews flowers like an epitaph. A Wisconsin farm blanketed in January...robotic babies dusting the floor...reposing nude...many men wearing a single mustache.

“Daniel!”

She's dead, she's alive. She's a construct.

Behind me I hear a sound, the creak of a door where none existed moments ago. Eliza walks in, suited up, her com gleaming on an acrylic sash. She crackles with interference, then reassimilates fully. Her finger, seemingly, solidly, brushes my arm and I reach up to feel the warmth of her touch. The tingle of a lingering...

“I'm waiting,” she mouths and I stand reluctantly, joining her, and we vanish together into the void.

Summer winding down

  ...but still hot as h(eck)!

The passion flower is coming into its own, late in the season.

The garden bench has a visitor, this perky little clemetis



Guess what tomorrow is?




Points of Interest



morning glories & memories. i frogetted!



no loitering! ha, pull up a sit down



yea, i bite




hey, i got a new doggie! look close



setting fire to slippery slopes

He left for the hills the night of a thousand lights

As the families stood in the streets

Rooted like vegetables ripe for the harvest

It was like a bad movie, he lacked the recognition

An ocular strain as the road lengthened then expanded

To the point of fruition and the lights loomed with expectation

Growing, colliding and sparking as they neared

And the people stared with abject intrepidity

Resigned to their fate

He ran, alone through the ranks

Climbing scrub and scree

Slipping, tripping, dripping in fear

As the thousand lights or more bombarded town

And rushed in, a hot knife through butter

A match to kindling, tinder to smoke, smoke to dust

He neared the summit as the lights neared

Parting the terrain, laying waste to the crackling

And it grew, rushing upward in a chimney gust

And it grew, the soot, encapsulating his post

While he watched them pass

Growing silent in the dark,

A spark on the horizon, then nothing

But heat as  flames gain the peak

Sundays go by toooo quickly

...a new batch of Sundays... click on to biggify

a bit of 2 weeks



some bug or the other - at the Extension Office



passion flower vine

nice kitchen, eh?

floaters at Riverfest

a bit of junk dredged from the river and artified

last but not least, the tail end of a bizarre storm that blundered through and kept on going...apparently it mucked up a good stretch of habitation...bad weather!

happy family visits, Internet problems, and the Monster Storm that blew across the Midwest and  lands beyond have mucked about mightily with blogging efforts...here are some maybe not so funny/bizarre stuffs to get the ball rolling again...
if you're not already, enjoy the heat!

Reginald Speaks

He had a hand in her death, a shadowy figure stretched from a time out of time, but the remnants were there and truth be told, his fingerprints told another story.

To hide his shame, Reginald grew a beard and left it to fetter and rot his soul, even as the strands of his loathing swelled like ivy grown heavy on a crumbling brick wall. With every forlorn step his envy increased, the desire to have her back. To procure her soul he would retrace his steps, under the guise of flamboyance, so utterly obvious so as to throw off his dissuaders.

Reginald searched in every book store, ransacked the shelves and wooden crates of dirty thrift shops. Under furtive candle light he prowled the crypts and corners of darkened museums, only to find nothing, the curious absence of even the trace of his obsession. Only after combining the smoking visage of a childish badger head, the quavering form of humiliation, and a crucifix in lieu of comfort, did Reginald accept the truth. He did the only thing then that he could imagine, and armed himself to the teeth, holing up in a stained glass silo. He lay on his back staring at the sun, when it deemed to pass overhead, and slowly went blind.

He met her when he was much younger, but the time was not etched upon his memory, only written on the pages of a small black diary that Reginald could no longer access. The reading stone wouldn't crack to his fingertips, could not discern the texture of his voice, so those memories were lost forever, hidden deep in the recesses of his damaged soul. If there was color, it was in those days relived, a deep rewind from a charcoal future he would never have willingly set foot in. That's how he could tell the past apart form the present, his dreams were only fuzzy misrepresentations but wandering in a haze was the only thing Reginald had left to him. With eyes wide open, seeing nothing, Reginald reclined and stared into what once was, or the possibility of a bygone truth.

Much younger, he was taking pictures, she was in the field naked and posing, taking money from a man who had very little in the way of wealth. Reginald later transposed the negatives into shady representations of a moment in time, like taking a phrase and passing it around a room of hundreds. He never knew what shape an image would morph into, but as he peered into the brush strokes he could remember the original point in time, the graceful form of a young woman with wisps of summer wheat creeping up her calves.

Even as Reginald engaged her in conversation - they would picnic on a grassy slope, Diane in her summer frock barefoot on the turf - she was distant like a dandelion seed blowing in the wind. As if she had better places to be. He would munch a corner from his square of sandwich and stare at her neck, she talked about islands and flying, his mind drifted off to a cabin decades out of reach, a warm fire and meat on the table, she was climbing mountains and skiing with the sun cascading off her flowing hair like sparklers on a starlit night. Even if their eyes could meet, their paths would surely never cross, even when their lips finally touched and their bodies rolled in the grass and crushed the tassels beneath their writhing coupled weight, their futures could not mesh.

Diane posed, she took his money and his love, then took her leave like a wave crashing on the beach erasing footsteps in the sand. What Reginald gave to her she didn't need, but for a moment. She took more from him than he intended to give. To Diane's detriment, he meant to take it back. That and more.

They became friends, because he guessed the depth of their relationship. Once the sex was out of the way, and her course firmly in mind, Diane found she could spare a smile and a steady hand for her quirky photographer. In and around shoots the two would meet for lunch, see the occasional play. Diane was outgoing and friendly by nature, she hung on the arms of many men, but Reginald was the only one she called friend. She confided in him. Reginald was always there, always around. He never seemed to have other plans. He listened, rarely spoke, there was something in his eye, not a splinter but a wedge that forced his gaze askew. If Diane noticed she never mentioned the affliction, thinking it rude, never seeing the thing growing behind his mask.

A great fan cooled the desert, it blew across the engineered ice fields and gave birth to clouds that dropped their sweet nectar on the parched land. Home grown farmers ruled the brown orb, void of ocean but crisscrossed by muddy veins weaving their way down the slopes and burgeoning plains. A dozen moon discs converged and wended their orbits in a programmed dance modus operandi. It was a sight the colonists never tired of during the sunset hour, when the spades were locked away and dinner settled in their stomachs. In the city, a dusty relic of the survivors, Diane leaned out a window from her room above the general store. Every pane was up and the dry air flowed into and out leaving tiny drifts of desert silt in the corners. She worked downstairs, but plied her talents where she could, for trade or cash. Someday, somewhere across the sands she knew there was a place where metal towers and bridges spanned the gaps and rocket ships still broke the bonds of this futile ball of dirt. There were things that crossed the uncrossable, she and Reginald spoke of them. He had seen them, there were pictures in the books where the old library stood.

Through some bizarre experiment Reginald had created a cube of shimmering coldness, to hold it was at once awing and then painful. He made one, then another dozen and meant to surprise Diane with the curiosities. Upon bringing the cubes in a sealed container to her room, he found her gone. Vanished, nothing but sunlit angles and shadows splashed across the dusty walls. Twelve red dots remained, paint splotches, tacked upon a vertical surface and one rough painting of lily pads on a stoic pond. Something from a dream, another world. Reginald knew she was leaving. She was running away from her life here, from him.

A mottled group of neerdowells gathered at the station, a derelict lean to built of chiseled rock gathered from the dry moraine basin. Clouds hung low on the horizon, the last sunlight of the day fading from the sky's ceiling, and the moon discs had finished their dance. Diane sat on a bench with one bag filled with everything she owned. Her money gone, spent on a one way ticket to span the desert. Slowly they dispersed and left her there alone waiting on the night transport. It rode quickly on one track, if the way was clear. Reginald crept up on her in the darkness, the winter skies closed in fast once the sun dropped below the curve of the orb, and laid his hand upon her shoulder.

“Reginald,” Diane gasped, stifling a scream. Then she smiled, trying to explain.

Reginald laid his insulated box down on the bench and stood over her. “Don't bother talking, I won't believe a word of it.” A leg bent, the bare foot suspended in air, an angel's pose, fingers on her chin, mouth agape and wide eyed. Diane held a small snake between her fingers and looked it in the eye. She stuck out her tongue at it and laughed. Reginald showed her the photographs as Diane sat in the corner, bloodied and bound in the darkness. “How could you leave me, how, when we had this?”

Finally he opened the box and plucked out a single cube, a strange perishable object unseen in this part of the world. Even in her bruised and confused state Diane wondered at it, quivered as bits fell off onto her thigh and puddled there, coldly. She'd never felt anything like it, unless Diane counted the deep deep night when a wisp of wind from the mountains might fall over her naked shoulders and give her a brief chill. This feeling was much more intense, magnified. Diane shivered.

“I made it for you,” Reginald said. He lowered the cube onto her leg and let it sit there, burning into her flesh. “Don't cry,” he cautioned and picked up the thing as it slid down her leg and off onto the floor. Slowly in the warm air of the building the cube lessened and then disappeared. “Another, for you my friend?”

She held out to the end, never giving in to his loving gaze, never capitulating the horrid friendship he had cultivated in his own twisted mind, until the transport came and left. Diane's ticket was punched and the rider departed on time, only an empty box on his lap with a drop of water puddling in one vibrating corner.

Tied, her neck hanging limp, in a corner, a hole in the roof sending a hot beam of sun onto her lap. They found her out of town amidst the graffiti that paraded overhead like some brief soliloquy. In the shadows Diane might have gone unseen for days, mute and uncomplaining, but Reginald felt her presence everyday at the other end of the world. He could no longer bother with the beauty that the engineers built up from the frigid core of their planet. While the wild sun cooked off the fleeting life giving ice of the lonely orb, Reginald lay, blinded, in his glass refractory, succumbing to the memories and dying as the heat melted the dew from his skin, sucking every drop through his pores up the shimmering walls to the sky. Clouds formed and traveled high above the sands, raining down his tears on a parched land where nothing lives for long.

missed the deadline Sundays!

click on the pics to immensify

June Garden

blanket flower - best new addition

one of the many Toby paths

crumbling in the dogwood garden

coming from another direction

hey, don't be wrestling the Ajuga! That ain't no weed