Of Silver Cruets and Little Spoons

Part 3

This was a dicey thing, Nessay thought, as she wormed her way around the domes. Then she said it aloud, a whisper just to hear her voice, just to know mere breath was not a phantom reflex. “Dicey.” A gripping fear took her then, and Nessay leaned tight against one of the homes, hidden by shadows. Something was different about her surroundings. It was slight, but noticeable, now that she was still. The air felt odd, perhaps it was the smell. She sniffed, and that wasn’t enough so she inhaled deeply, then stifled a cough. Stupid, stupid. Be careful, she thought. “Why,” she mumbled. Why am I doing this? But she was, and slowly Nessay proceeded.

 Getting back to where you once were is the first obstacle, but once achieved is the most mundane. Going beyond, well, that’s the real trick. Learning that the game is constantly changing is another big leap, a hurtle sometimes insurmountable when your timing is in flux… always. And, that thing about Pie in the Sky? Not everything true is also believable:

                Mercifully, her demise was not a traumatic one. She didn’t linger on her death plane in agony, or awaken in a blank, indiscernible cloud bank with the sharp intake of antiseptic miasma. Nessay blinked twice, the international signal for “hello, this is new”, and looked both right and left. Her body seemed whole, she felt alive, and she flexed her fingers. Her joints didn’t creak and there was no dirt beneath her fingernails. Blood. There was no blood! Nessay nibbled tentatively on her lip. Her surroundings were somewhat hazy, if not colorful and chaotic, but the air began to clear and Nessay saw she was in a formal living room, sitting straight backed on a Victorian divan, with a silver service laid out on the ornately carved coffee table at her knees.

                There seemed to be no one else around. The room was rather larger than her entire dwelling space, back… wherever.  Large and square, the room was all wood and cloth and leather, and a whole lot of books lined the oaken bookcases from floor to ceiling. There were oil paintings on the walls and shelves, of faces and dogs and places Nessay didn’t know of. She tipped a book out from a waist high location, and wondered remotely how she had come to be standing here, and not sitting there. Now, sitting back there, and with a ‘make yourself at home’ sensibility, Nessey lifted the decanter, she felt the warmth of the hot liquid through the shiny handle, and poured pitch black coffee into her cup. She lifted the pearly white cup to her lips, but the drink was too black, so black it seemed empty and just the thought of drinking sent her a tremor of loss. The starless, shadowless void in the cup clouded her soul and Nessay feared the liquid would fill her veins like hot lead, or priceless fluid gold that would leave her desirable, but otherwise lifeless.

                Nessay drank it instead with cream that she poured from a cruet, and she stirred it in with a little spoon while her finger traced the raised letters on the leather covered book she had retrieved from the bookcase. Jumping from one feeling to the next, being here then there, Nessay felt somewhat in control, but her steps were out of joint with this new, strange existence. She reasoned, reasonably, she must be in a waystation, awaiting transport to the next reality. In the meantime, she was here in a room taken from an image in her head. Her body was the same. Her clothing was no different, and bloodless. Nessay again found herself standing, on a rug in the room, and she unzipped then reached into her pocket. The little, hard ball was not there. All was not the same.

goto Part 4

A little Death, is good for the Soul

Part 2

There was blood. Blood! For a little while, but it seemed longer - relatively speaking it was probably seconds - she heard nothing. She saw nothing but the blood that rapidly pooled beneath her left elbow, on the tarmac. Then, a tapping noise and something hard clattered on the hard walkway. Footsteps falling away and fading out….

 One thing begets another, clouds batter the sky like a threat; the people and the world remain unaffected for the most part. There is no pie in the sky all-knowing righteous starship fairy king that dispenses karma like ice cream sprinkles to the wronged, or inflicts lemon imbued hemorrhoids on the wicked. It seems a person makes her own fortune, or lives on the whim of another’s:

                After the long ride back from the monument, the RBT, Nessay spent time in her office. It was a shared space, her part being an old metal desk that wobbled, with two drawers that couldn’t close flush, and didn’t come remotely close to locking. There being no key, that was moot. She sat on a wooden chair for a few moments and fiddled with the various rock samples she had stored on a tray, collecting her thoughts. Then she scribbled a dozen notes onto a pad of paper and ripped off the sheet. Nessay was the field supervisor for the RBT, but not the region boss. This was her way of keeping the boss duly informed.

                She looked at her watch. Daylight would be done over soon enough. Still time for a bit of wall ball, just to clear her mind. Technically this was her day off.  The door was open, but nobody was around, so Nessay rummaged through the bag she had stored in the office and pulled out some shorts and a t-shirt. She pulled off her shoes, and her office cloths, then redressed quickly, looking over her shoulder the whole time. There was a small wall court behind the field headquarters and she could be out hitting a ball in minutes, just needed a water bottle her equipment. Stepping out the door she rubbed her shoe on the metal threshold and felt a curious scraping. Nessay leaned on the jamb and bent her knee, grabbing an ankle to scope the sole of her shoe. Her eyes widened as she spied something small and round lodged into the treads of her sneaker: one of those damned metally balls, she thought. “Feathers and duck beaks,” she swore out loud. “Oh Gods of Thunder, cook me with a Cuban. This day’s amuck!” Nessay felt a pinge of guilt for the business she’d given Jocu’le.

                Too many mucks in a row, Nessay had had it. She undressed and redressed, not giving a flip if anyone was around or not, and packed up. The little ball, made of what she didn’t know, Nessay dropped into her pocket and zipped it in. She rubbed her pants and felt the hard pill snugged in, safe

and tight. Better than in a rickety metal desk with no locks, she thought.  “A drink!” she said, and headed out, dropping the note in the box by her boss’s door. She knocked in case he was there, and then skipped out into the dust, sipping on her bottle contently.

                Getting from here to there was easier, and quicker, then the trip out to the site. The field office was in a small row of low buildings that was cut into a rock shelf in a sea of sand. It was a small compound just a mile beyond the city of Willowy. The dust stroked the sheltering poplars and whistled through the antennae and sand etched dishes spoking up from the offices. Nessay straddled her electric animal and trotted out of the hollow toward home. Her room was in one of many little houses that bubbled up like puffy white fungi, encircling the outskirts of the Willowy storm wall. The ever present gales of sand and grit mostly slipped around the clay drenched mounds, of course transporting bits of the structures down the way to settle on someone else’s porches and window sills. Nessay thought about things like the dust and porches and even pianos, though she’d never seen one except in pictures. But if there was one around here, somewhere, there would surely be dust on it, wouldn’t there?

                Just down the road she turned off and moved down a slight slope. There was a rock abutment a hundred yards out, and it looked West over the dunes and a mostly unobstructed view. Well, no wall ball, but no reason not to watch the sunset. Nessay got down from her beast and dropped over the wall, shrugging down and splayed out comfortably to enjoy the show. She was just in time. The golden orb was dipping into the dissipating dust cover and sinking through the shifting dunes. Colors crept up and spread out over the horizon, twinkling off the wind whipped sand prisms. Nessay loved that most about this place, the desert. She stayed there until the night sky covered the dunes like a blanket. A thick, cotton spread of stars and galaxies. Maybe a planet two, but Nessay didn’t know which little bright pinpricks were their closest neighbors. That star was a little blue, that one a bit red… oh never mind.

                It was plenty dark as she got back to home. The roads became harder and freer of sand closer to town, and she braked a little as her animal winded among the habitats. Metal on metal squealed, the rotating hooves clattered on the bricks, and her white home popped into view. She cozied up the electric animal to its stall and swung down, pulling her bag smoothly off the pommel. Her room was an open space, nearly 500 square feet divided between a bedroom and living space, in a shared dome house.

                Nessay walked around the curved dome to the second door, her sneakers kicking up silent dust from the concrete pad when she heard a sound, a click, then nothing but night. She wondered, she thought about it, but not too much. Is that blood? What would become of the little round ball, she remembered, in her pocket? Her one arm was bent, the other seemed to be under her leg?, and she could just brush her pant pocket, feeling the mysterious little thing there, but it seemed to dissolve beneath her touch. Then Nessay died.

goto Part 3

everything, in perspective

the de-evolution of Thingy

Covering the Ground, with Big Intentions

Part One

When she walked through that door the first time, and merged with her doppelganger, the surprise was palpable. Nessay, though she momentarily forgot the specifics concerning herself, encountered a barrage of senses, like a backhand across her stunned faced, and seized up. Luckily, in this space, it was just the cat she had to impress. It just stared, and then preened, having seen weirder things. Cats live in all dimensions at once, or so they say. Now whatever surprises lie beyond the doors were related merely to the disruptions of time and space. Still, Nessay always carried a personal sized air mask, just in case. And a spare space ball or two.

 In the beforehand, in this particular dimension, how it all started, in a circle with no beginning and with no end: 

      The platform rumbled along, a wheeled thingy with many levels suspended between its high walled discs, over the desert. Nessay wasn’t dressed for a dig, not this day, but for a quick look at the site. She’d gotten a communique, an urgent request, and chose not to throw off the comfortable office smock or stylish sneakers she wore for a round of wall-ball on her lunch hour. Meanwhile, she mused. The trip out to the monument was not a short one. The natives were protective of the lands Inbetween, but like most indigenous, the Nopies had no real control over the important stuff. The monument was sacred, it was all everything, it harbored the creation story, the beginning, maybe their end. That was all hokum, everyone knew it – didn’t make it fair. These were some of the things Nessay mused over. And she hummed a little along with the rumblings of the great wheel and the crushed gravel and the swirling dust. She hummed and the monument began to rise over the dune crests. Then she whistled. Even now it was a sight, the really big thing (RBT) that may or may not be an ancient construction. For all they knew it was celestial. A spaceship, a gift from the gods, an enormous space hog excavation. The Nopies held vigil at its base, once. Now it belonged to the world, and the world, as it tended to do, dug its little holes for, you know, science’s sake.

      The ID badge swung from a cord around her neck, bounced off her smock, and whipped with the wind. The dust stung her cheeks, tried to swirl under the airtight goggles. Nessay dug the badge out, as it had dived into her smock and nestled into the fleshy bits, and swiped it, gaining access to the adit. A guard was sleeping just inside the door, but stirred when the pressure changed. “’Lo there, Ma’am. Jocu’le said you’d be along.”

      “Go back to sleep, Jimms,” she said, stomped her feet on the vacuum mat, then pushed through the remaining airlock. The long walk into the heart of the RBT was straight; it was one hundred and fifteen Nessay steps. The smooth bored walls gleamed with pearly, atmospheric striations of many, many known minerals. Nessay stopped at one point and touched the curve above her head. The silvery vein peered down on her pate like an eyeball. “I see you, too,” she said, smiled up into its seeming gaze for a moment, and went on. Jocu’le waited at the end, in a hollowed out chamber about the size of a vaulted living space in a standard outlying desert single family stone dome. It was spacious, enough so that air currents moved about, deposited errant bits of dust and sand on anything that lay still for more than half a day. Jocu’le picked up a ream of coordinate pages and blew a miniature storm off its surface.

     “Aha,” he said, seeing his superior. “We uncovered a wee chamber. Over there,” he nodded over his shoulder to the right. “Watch your step, Jimms just a bit ago dropped a jar and little balls spilled out, covered the ground. Went all over saint’s hallowed ground.” He dug into his pocket and pulled out a little ball about the size of a marble.

      Nessay took the ball. It was cold, like steel, or vermiculite, but she couldn’t see exactly what it might be made of. “Langauge,” Nessay said, her teeth clicked. “Did you get them all?” Jocu’le nodded, then shrugged, raised an eyebrow. “Check the corners, check your cuffs and trousers. Look in your shoes, too. I’ll pat down Jimms on the way out.” She looked around at the floor and stepped over to the new chamber. The shards of jar were gathered into a small pile. A wood bowl held its prior contents. “Was the jar full? Yes? Run a diagnostic then, so we can get a semi-accurate count of the balls. Do assume maximum settling.” Nessay breathed out and folded her arms across her chest.

      “Well, that’s all I wanted,” said Jocu’le sheepishly. “Sorry about the mess. You’re in the field tomorrow, then?”

     “Tomorrow, yeah,” Nessay said. She didn’t mince words, much, in the field. Her eyes always worked overtime in the field, her eyes held court over her tongue here. “Here, don’t miss this one,” she handed the little ball back to Jocu’le, who stepped over and dropped it onto the pile in the bowl.  

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beachy weather. Not!

New horror themed doodles!

Dad, and some doodlethings

found grocery list.click on pics,

                                                                                      for extrava-enormahugeness.

dad

another found grocery list

dad in space