The Angel In The Juniper

Old Clyde Adamson was plotting with the Jacobin faction.

Holly, who had studied under him only the subjects he taught on the side—Neoplatonism in the early Church Fathers, and Classical Drama—had hired on a month ago as his secretary, and was now perfectly sure.

It was disturbing. One couldn’t deny that the present republic had degraded to the mere form of representative government under the last president and his hand-picked parliament, but the Jacobins were dangerous—low-profile activists who had formally concluded that the governmental system no longer admitted renewal by legitimate means, and were prepared to incite even revolution to restore the principles of the four-hundred-year-old Constitution.

Holly didn’t know yet how deeply Prof. Adamson was involved with the faction, or how high a member he might be. She felt sure that, with his broad scholarly reputation and influence, he could hardly fail to be a decisive force in the group. But the thought that the boss she so liked and respected could be a treasonist, hardly alarmed her more than the inevitable, gastric knowledge that this brilliant man knew, or would very soon know, that she knew. And would address the fact, to protect himself and his party. Somehow.

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Take-em!

“OK Dad, I’ll come for the long weekend, but I’m not sure I want to hunt with you,” Joey said as he wound up his longest conversation with his father in years. “Those couple of hunts you took me on when I was thirteen didn’t make a hunter out of me. I just remember being cold and that we didn’t shoot much. Anyway, I don’t know that I’m the type to enjoy killing things.”

Joey’s parents had divorced six years ago and his mother had moved them to a busy metropolitan area on the east coast. During those years, he’d seen very little of his father whose work as a petroleum engineer required extensive periods of foreign travel and residency. Joey’s experiences of nature and wildlife were limited to the local parks of Chevy Chase, Maryland, where hunting was neither encouraged or tolerated, camo clothing was regarded as a symbol of ignorance, and most people didn’t know a mallard from a mockingbird. Through deep immersion in urban life, he’d acquired the belief that hunting for sure and maybe fishing too were at best questionable activities not suited to the modern age of growing population, environmental problems of all sorts, and scarce resources. But he respected his father as a well-educated man, known as a staunch environmentalist of his community, who had hunted from boyhood on. What was the appeal of it? Why was he still doing it at the age of fifty? Now nineteen and starting his junior year of college, Joey really wanted to reestablish a relationship with his father, man to man, as he envisioned it, and he would explain his reasons for doubt about the proposed hunt, now just a few weeks away. Whether he hunted or not, Joey hoped they would become close again by the experience. And maybe he would even find something positive about hunting if he gave it a chance.

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Reach

Jack Benson stands dissolved in an ocean of strangers, humans he couldn’t have known existed until forced to jostle with them for space and share odors. He recoils imperceptibly with each touch, eager not to offend or stand out any further. As a mass they flow like a tide, but he senses that, as individuals, each is preoccupied with being elsewhere.

He marvels at this accretion of humanity, at how in each moment, somewhere on Earth, such a mass of people goes about their day. Who are they? What do they want, feel, do with their lives? The man next to him smells of cigarettes and holds a child’s doll. He looks nervous. Perhaps it’s been a while since he saw her. He wonders if there is a set of personality archetypes such that it’s possible to know every type of person that has ever existed, if only you could map them onto the right template.

This thought had struck him while on the plane. He had sat next to someone—round-backed, in his forties and dressed in brown chinos and a blue turtleneck, no doubt middle management in some tech company—whom he felt he had met so many times before, the way he introduced himself unprompted, assured of the pleasure of his own company.

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Junk Birds

I wait to cross over to the marigold-strewn gate of the brick shikhara, where stucco meditating Buddhas have looked down from their niches for over 1900 years. A teen clomps past me using his powerful forearms attached to wood blocks to drag his twisted body. He moves straight through the horn-blasting cars, busses, and zig zagging rickshaws, and his halo of space remains untouched. The pigeons and stray dogs go about their perfectly crafted business. A man with a switch emerges from shadows to thwack away a piebald cow grazing his pashmina display.

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Now The Leaves Are Falling Fast

I watched my wife leave our neighbor’s house, her empty hands shoved deep in the pockets of her red anorak. She came inside through our carport. I met her in our kitchen.

“Beverly was really happy for the soup,” she said. “Honestly, it was a little sad. She said no one else has brought food, and he’s going to hospice tomorrow. It’s really bad, and no one, not one single person, has reached out to her.”

Just what I thought. I have been watching my neighbor’s house from my living room chair on and off for at least two years now. William and Beverly have a simple 3/2 ranch that is the mirror image of ours, except William let his yard go to pot and I’ve kept mine up, even with my back shot to hell the way it is. I owe it to my family to take care of things. I owe it to my neighborhood. But not William. Well, what can you expect from a guy who let his daughter do prison time for selling drugs when he was the guy running the scheme? If you’re a man who is weak enough to do that, you don’t want to show your face outside to trim the hedges, and you also aren’t going to have many friends to lean on during your last days alive.

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StarStuck

They thought the boy odd from the day he was born. He had two eyes, two hands, two ears, two feet, but what confused the Great Purveyors of Reason to no end was that he giggled, even when no one was looking, even without cause.

He was the first baby born in one thousand years in the Great Sky of Reason, so they had forgotten what youth was truly like. There, above Earth’s mountains and deserts and beaches, all lived by the strict dictates of logic, and the slightest flickering of impulsiveness, of emotion was pounced upon and dissected until it was reasoned away. The Great Purveyors could not risk allowing feelings to get the better of anyone for it caused people to act irrationally or without forethought. Such behaviors were the bane of Reason, and thereby had to be eliminated to maintain equilibrium of the mind, which was by far the most commonsensical way to live.

The boy grew older and his smiles only increased as he discovered the world around him. His oddity became more apparent as he delighted in obscure, little things; like the feel of grass between his toes, the trickle of rainwater through his hair, the squish of mud between his palms. He chased after fireflies without a jar, he built castles in the sand even though waves washed them away. His parents struggled to understand their eccentric little boy, who laughed even though he had no knowledge or philosophy or understanding of pleasure, joy, and happiness. Even once the boy was old enough to walk and talk and ask reasonable questions, his imagination remained unhindered.

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Echo

“I think you’re focused too much on this. Names are just arbitrary titles handed to us by others. Why should this one matter?”

“Because it’s not my name! It’s not even a name.”

“You need to start thinking of it as your name.”

“It…doesn’t feel like me.”

“And which me is that?”

“Wha—the me I’ve always been! Martha!”

“Martha is dead.”

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Soon The Sentence Sign

Jason Sweeney sat quietly; his hands secured behind him. He glanced at the young uniformed Korean woman who had arrested him.

Marshal Hwang Min Pak didn’t so much as look up from her pad and stylus. She clicked a corner of her electronic device, consulted its clock function, then powered it down and put it away. “It’s nearly noon local time. We should get to the security tower in another five minutes, give or take, so let me clue you in given it’s your first offense.”

Sweeney hunched his shoulders submissively and remained silent.

Marshal Pak settled back in her seat. “Titan’s the new frontier, ‘Sweeney Todd’. We don’t have enough population-or criminals-to warrant a full-time legal system. Circuit court judges have a long haul to get here via interplanetary, so waiting for a regular trial can mean being imprisoned for a long time before anything happens.”

The transport began to slow. “But it was just a bar fight, and he started it!”

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Sienna’s Monster

in ,

Sienna lived with a monster, but no one else knew it.

The first time Sienna realized that her monster wasn’t like the rest was in 4th grade. The whole grade assembled in the auditorium. A police officer watched them enter from his place on the stage. His stern presence and heavy uniform covered the room in a quiet and serious mood.

Officer Charles told the kids that they had a right to live in a safe home and explained that not every kid had a happy family – some lived with monsters! Little Sienna’s eyes widened with hope.

He is talking about me! I’m not the only one living with a monster?!

She knew Officer Charles would tell them all about her monster, and then save her!

“The signs of living with a monster are easy to spot if you know what to look for. If your friend displays scratches on their body, those may be from a monster. Remember, monsters have four claws on each forelimb, so the scratches come in sets of four and are often quite deep.”

With these words, Officer Charles snuffed out that small spark of hope. Sienna’s monster had never scratched her, at least not yet. She lived in constant fear of the hooked blades at the end of her monster’s fingers, though she had never felt their burn on her skin.

Officer Charles continued, “Monsters also frequently drink alcohol – they need this fuel so they can breathe fire. Of course, humans drink alcohol too, but monsters drink much more at one time and then breathe fire over their whole family soon after. If you or a friend are living with someone who burns their child in fits of anger, these are clear signs of a monster in hiding.”

The officer went on to explain how to help a friend or where to seek help for yourself, but Sienna hardly heard him. She knew then that her monster would never be found out. No one would save her. Sienna’s monster never drank alcohol, and he never scratched her with his forepaws.

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Bill And The Tooth Fairy

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Bill believed in the Tooth Fairy.

Big deal, you’re thinking. Lots of kids believe in the Tooth Fairy.

Well, Bill wasn’t a kid. He was twenty-eight years old.

You don’t believe it. My girlfriend Mary Beth didn’t believe it, either. We were having dinner with Bill and his friend Coralee. I guess I should say that Coralee was Bill’s girlfriend, but I can’t quite make myself do that. Coralee was a friendly soul who went places with Bill and tried to make him seem a little less strange than he would have been otherwise. She felt some genuine affection for Bill, but to hear her tell it, she was mainly doing her Christian duty in helping one of God’s odder children feel more comfortable in a world that didn’t seem to fit him very well.

We were having a good dinnertime talk when Bill suddenly brought up the Tooth Fairy.

“Bill, let’s not talk about that,” Coralee said, with an uncharacteristic note of strain in her voice.

“Why not?” asked Bill. “Roy and Mary Beth don’t seem to mind.”

“It’s fine with me,” I said. “Not what I expected to be discussing this evening, but that’s okay.”

Bill smiled. “No bad time to talk about the Tooth Fairy, right?”

“Well, maybe not when you’re at the dentist getting a tooth filled,” answered Mary Beth.

Bill laughed, too loudly. Coralee had tried to coach him on that, but Bill was still prone to raucous laughter over little ha-ha lines that would barely earn a chuckle from most of us.

“You’re right, Mary Beth. Even the Tooth Fairy herself wouldn’t think you should talk about her while you’re getting one of your precious molars repaired.”

Coralee smiled thinly. “And speaking of unpleasant things, I ran into the worst traffic on 285 this morning. Some joker was …”

Bill cut her off. “Now, Coralee, we weren’t done talking about the Tooth Fairy. You know she doesn’t like it when you disrespect her like that.”

“Wait, I’m lost,” said Mary Beth. “Who doesn’t like … what?”

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Simon

in ,

Simon killed the Devil. It wasn’t an easy feat, to kill something immortal, but Simon had been up to the task.

“I thought I was giving a gift to all humanity,” Simon said at his trial, his orange jumpsuit glowing like a sun under the neon lights. “I really did.”

But that wasn’t for him to say.

“I mean, who wouldn’t shoot Old Scratch, given the chance?”

“Mr. Lancaster, it is not for us mortals to judge whether another is fit for death,” the prosecuting attorney claimed, his balding pate sweating even though the air conditioner in the courtroom had to be sucking half the power in town. “Mortal judgment is God’s work, not man’s.”

“Objection, your honor,” Simon’s lawyer barked from his seat.

“On what grounds?” the judge asked.

“Penal code 167b. The death penalty. Human society has deemed it appropriate under certain circumstances to determine whether a life should be terminated on moral grounds.”

“Through due process.”

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Mahabbah

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“I know this might sound kind of wild, but I’ve got a plan to save the world.” Jacqueline said to Aziz, gazing at him with her vivid blue eyes. They were out to lunch at Al Jyr, sitting beside a window. Their table sported a vase filled with azure hyacinths and the window overlooked a dusty street several floors below. “You see, I made a new type of virus that… well, it changes people for the better.” Jacqueline continued. “The virus edits a few genes, rewires some neurons, and changes the levels of some hormones. It turns us humans from nasty tribalists into far more compassionate people.”

“You’re kidding.” Aziz smiled.

“No, really!” Jacqueline insisted. “There’s been a lot of hatred, cruelty, and pain all over the world. I think this virus is gonna fix things. I call it Mahabbah and its name means love.”

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