Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

The room had all of Jeanine’s passions on display: flower press still stuffed with orchids and daisies, posters from classic films on the walls, and pots of artist’s sculpting clay and acrylic paints.

Jeanine had always taken a flower from everywhere she’d gone, and pressed it into a scrapbook. She didn’t keep a diary or a blog–her laptop was tucked in a corner too–but her flowers served that purpose and then some. Arthur was tempted to open the press and see if there were any labels, but the light layer of dust that had already accumulated–it was an old house–said that the press had been left unattended for some time.

The classic posters were all reproductions save the one in a place of honor: an original 1941 banner for “The Maltese Falcon”–she had always liked mysteries–yellowed with age, edges ragged and deep crevices crisscrossing Bogart’s face where it had been folded over the years. It wasn’t a particularly attractive poster to begin with, but it was nevertheless lovingly mounted in a brass, archival quality frame.

Jeanine had been trying to take up sculpting as well…most of the paint bottles and sculpting clay cans were unopened, and only a few half-finished turtles and squirrels littered the small work area on her desk. They needed work–a lot of work–but she had been ready to do what it took to master the art.

If she’d gotten the chance.

“I wonder what someone will think when they go through my room, afterwards,” Arthur sighed. “Dead or disappeared, it’s still a clean cut through everything her life used to be.”

People, especially in the media and entertainment industry, have made wishing upon a star out to be some mystical process. But it’s really quite simple.

Since wishes travel faster than the speed of light, the star so wished upon receives the request instantly if it still exists; many stars in the night sky have gone supernova but we won’t find out until the light from the explosion reaches us. This is, incidentally, why many wishes go unanswered.

Once received, the wish is sent off for central processing. How efficiently that happens depends on the volume of requests; popular stars like Sirius and Polaris are much more likely to be backlogged. Processing takes place in the heart of the universe, where the wishes are sorted by length, complexity, and deservedness. Whether or not any previous wishes have been granted, and whether the granting of a wish might reveal too much about the process are taken into account as well.

From there, tweaks are made directly to the fabric of the universe, as it is a convenient location for doing so. Unlike the act of wishing, the act of granting a wish does *not* happen faster than the speed of light, hence a delay of minutes to years. If someone dies before their scheduled wish is fulfilled, this is duly noted and forwarded to the next life for compensation.

Difficulties arise when people wish on things that are not, strictly speaking, stars in the night sky. Wishing on a planet, like Venus, or a shooting star may coincidentally reach a star in that general direction, or it may hurtle into the void. As much as they enjoy hearing from you, neither planets nor meteorites have any pull with the celestial bureaucracy. Wishing on the Sun is not done very often anymore, even though it is technically a star. In the old days of sun worship it was more common, but strict tradition keeps stars from forwarding wishes from within their own orbits. Some kinder stars have been known to forward the wishes anyway (our Sun sends them through Alpha Centauri B).

With a sigh, I slid into the comfortable embrace of my booth. It was really ‘my’ booth for two reasons. First, I’d never seen anyone sit there but me. Second, I was there so often that I’d worn a groove into the thinly padded seat and knew the stains on the table not only by size, color, age, and substance, but also by name. My glass was sitting in ‘Bob’, which it should have considered holy ground–countless other glasses had met their fate on that spot.

I sank back into my groove, and leisurely took in the surroundings. Not much to see–Chum’s wasn’t known for its romantic atmosphere, but there were worse places. Aside from Chum himself, the bar was populated with the usual human flotsam–pilots and crew of various spaceships docked at the station, mostly. Guys who had been across the galaxy and back twice but had only seen the insides of a bar at each stop. At least I had seen some of those sights before choosing to haunt the bars.

A moment later, I heard laughter and shouting at the other end of the room. There isn’t ordinarily a lot of noise in Chum’s–anyone who gets too rowdy is usually politely asked to leave at the point of Chum’s gun. I turned my head and craned my neck to see what the commotion was about.

An older man was up against the far wall, surrounded by a group of drunken bar patrons. The crowd was so large that Chum’s usual method of crowd control would have been ineffective; he just slumped behind the bar, eying the group warily. The man in the middle of the bunch was speaking, but the barflies buzzing around him drowned his words out.

“Tell another ‘un!” one said.

The older man’s lips moved, but I still couldn’t make out what he said.

“Listen to him–the bum’s out of his gourd!” a second barfly slurred. He deftly reached out and tweaked the surrounded man’s nose.

“Denial…expected…face of hard truth…” I was able to catch snatches of the reply.

This seemed to rile the crowd even more. “Deenyle?” The first drunken mariner replied “What the hell izzat?”

I snorted to myself. Pickled space trash. Then again, I only knew what the state of denial was because I spent so much time there I could claim it as a second residence on my taxes.

“The geezer’s freakin’ crazy, man.” the second guy said.

The older man spoke again, but was overpowered out by the rising wave of insults and profanity.

The Mstumpuan was the great oral epic of the kingdom, telling of the exploits of the legendary founding god-king Mstumpu of the Quri kingdom. It was passed down for generations, largely unaltered–the penalty for failing to recite it properly was amputation or death, depending on the severity of the mistake.

When the Quri kingdom was cast down in defeat by the Segumbi, who did not have such a strong oral tradition, the penalty was inverted: amputation or death were now penalties for speaking the Mstumpuan, depending on the length of the recitation.

By the time Europeans arrived and cast down what remained of the Segumbi, only fragments of the Mstumpuan remained in folk memory or diaries kept by a few explorers and missionaries. Many of the oral traditions in that part of the world were castigated, but legend had it that the Mstumpuan contained vital clues and references to the land of Prester John.

It was therefore the object of obsessive study by European mystics, alchemists, and speculum-seekers. They interviewed the eldest Quri and Segumbi they could find for fragments of the tale. Rumors persisted that a Portuguese missionary named João of Amareleja had transcribed the entire epic in Latin shortly before he was stoned to death by the Segumbi, and many of the adventurers drawn to the region sought that manuscript instead.

“You mutinous bastards,” the captain choked from his bunk. “You’ve poisoned me. I can feel it in my bones.”

“Try not to talk, skipper,” the bos’n said, handing a steaming cup of soup across the bed. It was the best food left on board.

The captain swatted at it, weakly but with enough force to spill the contents across his blankets and bedclothes. The men’s hungry, mournful expressions made no impression on him.

“You’ve all been against me from the start,” the captain hissed. “From first steam to 80 degrees north. You wanted the glory for yourselves, and now you’ll die out here without my guidance.”

The mates tried to calm him down, but the captain was soon frothing at the mouth in a paroxysm of rage, or perhaps of death. Eventually they were able to get a bit between his teeth, and the surgeon gave him some morphine.

By nine o’clock the next morning, he was dead. The first mate sent a party trudging over the sea ice to the rocky short to bury him. When left to themselves, the deckhands began placing small wagers about how long the rest of them would survive without the only man aboard experienced in those icy waters. The officers, for their part, apparently saw to it that the arsenic bowl from the surgeon’s kit went missing.

I could only remember snatches.

Getting on the airplane in Tel Aviv…that was clear enough. Where had I been going? Grandma had been there. Perhaps I’d been to visit her and was on my way back to the States…

After that…I remember shouting, and darkness. Sharp sounds, maybe rifle or handgun shots. I’ve only ever seen either in movies. There are snatches of oaths in three languages–Hebrew, Arabic, English–and maybe others as well. I think they were saying things that Grandma would have given me a swat for.

An engine. I remember the comforting hum of an automobile engine long after the higher yawl of jet turbines had faded away. Maybe there were helicopter blades in there somewhere, or that could have just been what little I could remember of my medivac from the wilderness after my appendix burst…the only other time there were patches of black in my memory.

Precious little to go on, especially when confronted by a wall of unbroken dunes with nothing but sand, sky, and wind.

The attack against the Ismentro, an insignificant tributary in the sub-Alpine highlands, came on the heels of fifteen failed attacks before it. The Austrians had long suspected their erstwhile ally of treachery, and had carefully laid in their defenses and improved them based on their German allies’ combat experience. The Italian regiments waded into slaughter, armed with Carcano bolt-action carbines against heavy machine guns.

The Sixteenth Battle of the Ismentro appeared to be more of the same; Italian officers and enlisted men had observed the Austrians constructing improved fortifications through their field glasses. Thus, when the order went out to advance, it was disobeyed by nine out of the ten formations in the line.

General Codarna was livid when he received the news, and could barely be persuaded from ordering every last surviving man on the line to be shot. He settled for decimation instead: the old Roman practice of forcing the men to draw lots in groups of ten, with the winners beating the loser to death. It had served him well, or so he thought, on the Isonzo.

Word of the events reached the Austrians, who were preparing a general offensive for later in the year. As a result, their attack in the Ismentro sector fell squarely on the decimated troops.

The outrigger canoes had stopped arriving with trade when he had been but a boy. Uncle’s canoe, the only one on the isle capable of making the journey, had been carefully conserved until Father felt there was no other choice but to send it. Uncle and two cousins had set out, promising to return with the necessary trade goods or an answer for the traders’ disappearance.

They had never returned.

Father had died of sickness not long after, and before long the isle was wracked by illness–caused by starvation–and the infighting that caused. Those who didn’t succumb wound up mortally wounding each other in pointless struggles.

When it was time for his manhood ritual, only a cousin and half-brother remained to stand beside him. He could not take a wife, as the only two women on the isle were his close kin. They too dwindled away, like a dying bonfire. The last islander, a cousin, had died almost ten seasons ago, leaving him alone.

The outriggers had not returned. Food was plentiful enough for him to feed himself, but without help it was impossible to do much else. It would not be long before an accident or a sickness claimed his life, and then the isle would be empty.

He spent most of his time looking out to sea in the direction of the setting sun.

“Living in a Society Post-Chaste: A Fewhite Manifesto.”

Angela looked up. “What is this?”

“They’re giving them out by the student union,” said Tom.

“Well, I like the punnery going on in ‘post-chaste,’ but how do they expect anyone to take them seriously with a name like ‘Fewhite?’ No matter how you pronounce it, it sounds like either a 19th century agrarian cult or a kind of bat droppings.”

This post is part of the December 2011 Blog Chain at Absolute Write. This month’s challenge is a simple holiday story.

People often fail to realize the crushing abnormality of their lives as children. I was convinced that all the other kids’ mothers traded their pacifiers for small toys at the local five-and-dime as a reward for kicking the habit, or that the other kids’ fathers had jars of exotic bugs in preservatives at home and in the office. That was all I knew; that was “normal.”

Case in point: my parents always told my brother and I that we each got three wishes from Santa, as if he was some kind of genie you summoned by rubbing a Christmas ornament or something. It never occurred to me to compare notes with the other kids, because as far as I knew they each got their three wishes too. It wasn’t until third grade, when a friend boasted about the seven (!) things he’d gotten from Santa and another was excited about his single and solitary Santagift that I postulated the big man must have different allocations for different houses.

Now, of course, I know that my parents were a little low on the money scale my first few Christmases, and the tradition became ossified (plus, upping the present count after I was regularly a brat would hardly have sent the right message). It wasn’t until all the kids were in college and Santa was just a fond memory that we were chipped down to one gift apiece–and that quickly fell to zero as the family drifted apart and stopped spending holidays together.

Check out this month’s other bloggers, all of whom have posted or will post their own responses:
Ralph Pines
pyrosama
Cath
AbielleRose
writingismypassion
Domoviye
AuburnAssassin
Areteus
Diana Rajchel
Alynza
SuzanneSeese
robeiae
SinisterCola
MamaStrong
kimberlycreates