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April 8, 2013

From “Hot Dog Street” by Gail B. Regina

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Bennie could thereafter be seen cruising around town in souped-up, expensive cars, since he could apparently find no other outlet for his newfound wealth. He seemed to rotate fairly equally between a red For Mustang, a yellow Chevrolet Camaro, and a lime green Dodge Charger. Townsfolk seeing those new and expensive vehicles on the road began to derisively refer to the trio as “Ketchup, Mustard, and Relish.”

For his part, when Bennie was told of the nicknames, he enthusiastically adopted them as his own, and added themed trim and custom nameplates to each car. In addition, he began recruiting flunkies to drive the cars with him in a trio so that all three condiments were out at the same time.

All of that was, naturally, before the accident that spread Ketchup, Mustard, and Relish all over what soon became known in local circles as “Hot Dog Street.”

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April 7, 2013

From “Cinema Favorité” by Altos Wexan

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Many film critics preface their lists of notable cinema with the term “the best.” The best movies of the year, the best movie of all time. It makes for dramatic copy, but it’s also highly inaccurate. It would be better for them to simply say that the list contains their favorite films of the year, but that makes less attention-grabbing reading and removes the gloss obscuring the fact that all moviegoers, even critics, are subjective viewers. Only through consensus over time can anything have a claim to be “the best.” Everything else is just “my favorite.”

This explains why occasionally you’ll see a moviegoer or critic defend their love of a particular film (as the late Roger Ebert notoriously did with Burt Reynolds’ Rent-a-Cop) despite the fact that it’s nowhere near perfect cinema. A favorite movie is like a favorite car or a favorite pair of jeans–you love it for what it is, warts and all.

I recently realized that my favorite movie, at least insofar as I can name one, is 1993’s Jurassic Park, an assessment reinforced by its recent reappearance on the big screen.

Jurassic Park is in many ways a synthesis of other things in its director’s oeuvre. It combines the broad optimism evident in E.T. and the unrelenting horror from Jaws into something that’s its own beast, apart from the book and the many, many creature feature imitators that followed. There’s action, adventure, laughs (mostly courtesy of Jeff Goldblum, much more effective as a scene-stealer than a lead in the sequel), and a real human element as well.

That’s one criticism that “serious” critics leveled at the film that I never agreed with–that the special effects are great but that the characters are cardboard. I don’t think anyone was robbed at Oscar time, but Grant and Hammond have significant character arcs. Grant, the curmudgeonly character who hates kids, is forced to come to terms with his parental side by guiding the kids through the park; willing to scare a kid to death for insulting a dinosaur at the beginning, he’s ready to give up his life to protect one by the end.

And Hammond (a much different and more sympathetic character than in the book) has his idealism and showmanship tempered by harsh reality. Not only the controller who’s lost control, but an old man faced with the sobering reality that his dream may have cost the lives of the people he loves. My favorite scene in the film doesn’t involve any dinosaurs or special effects, but rather Richard Attenborough musing quietly on his life of showmanship over bowls of melting ice cream.

I’d be the first to agree that Jurassic Park isn’t a perfect movie. Several subplots from the book are shoehorned in and left dangling, most notably the mystery of the sick triceratops and the “lysine contingency.” Despite its screen time we never learn that the triceratops was becoming sick by eating West Indian Lilac as a crop stone, and the throwaway mention of the lysine contingency adds nothing to the picture other than a hurdle for future sequels to grapple with or ignore. The conceit that all the park workers except the main characters leave the island due to the storm (or perhaps daily, it’s not clear) strains credulity.

But still, I find myself as thrilled and engaged by Jurassic Park now as I was in 1993. Even a few notes of John Williams’ magnificent score are enough to make me want to pop in the DVD. It’s not a perfect movie, but it’s perhaps my favorite.

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April 6, 2013

From “The Red Bullet” by Pherick Kermode

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Mikkalsen would often show off his gear, particularly to the younger mercenaries that he often mentored. Most eventually asked about the 9mm crimson cartridge that he kept on a lanyard around his neck.

“That’s my red bullet,” Mikkalsen always said with a grin. “It’s enchanted never to miss, and I keep it for when I really need it.”

In the Kraithari Coup d’Eat of ’24, when Mikkalsen’s mercs were pinned down by artillery strikes being called in by a spotter on the ground, one suggested that he use the red bullet.

“I don’t really need it yet,” said Mikkalsen. He killed the spotter with a well-placed shot to the head with a normal bullet.

During the Siege of Ulmar-Kam in ’27, Mikkalsen was among the mercenaries pinned down at the docks by a sniper while the last ship out of town was casting off. Again it was suggested that he use his red bullet.

“I don’t really need it yet,” said Mikkalsen. The sniper was crushed by a shipping container that Mikkalsen dropped on him from a nearby crane.

In ’38, when bounty hunters from the Imar of Callicob were pursuing Mikkalsen with orders to bring him back for torture and dismemberment, the merc, injured by a broken leg and a bullet wound, sent his fellows on ahead.

“I need it now,” he said, removing the red bullet from his neck and loading it into his sidearm.

When the Imar’s men caught up with him, the found Mikkalsen already dead–with a single red shell casing on the ground next to him.

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April 4, 2013

From “L. R. Badeau on Being a Full-Time Unicorn” by Clemente Sperduti

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Sperduti, Clemente. “L. R. Badeau on Being a Full-Time Unicorn.” Hopewell Democrat-Tribune 4 Apr. 2013, University ed.: A2+.

Lots of children adorn their folders and lockers with unicorn stickers, and Lisa Frank’s cosmic vision of the creatures was long haute couture for elementry schoolers. Lynn Ruelle Badeau of Hopewell has taken that fascination a step further: she has become one of the nation’s few full-time unicorns.

Ms. Badeau spoke to the Hopewell Democrat-Tribune earlier this week: “I’ve always been fascinated with mythological creatures, not just because of their beauty, but also because of their potential to do good and serve as a symbol,” she said. “I was an equestrian and a hiker, and loved nothing more than long wilderness hikes and off the trail rides.”

Badeau had long been an admirer of books like Peter Beagle’s The Last Unicorn and its 1982 film adaptation, but it wasn’t until she graduated from Southern Michigan University’s Monaghan School of Business and began working as an accountant’s assistant that she began thinking of making her fascination into a full-time job. “I thought of majoring in something that involved chasing unicorns, but the closest thing the school had–art history–had a really awful placement rate. So I made the ‘grownup’ decision and became an accountant.”

Five years of clock-punching at the Hopewell accountancy firm of Heliotrope, Burgher, and Mendicant changed her mind. “It’s a good thing no one saw my expense account sheets,” Badeau laughs, “I covered every inch of empty space with unicorn drawings. I got the work done, but 90% of my time was daydreaming about being a unicorn.” She maintained her equestrian and wilderness hiking pursuits on the side, but holds that “it just wasn’t enough.”

It was a Motion magazine article about Venado un Cuerno that really opened Badeau’s eyes. “I read about Mr. un Cuerno in SoCal, who’d been a unicorn full-time for almost a decade, and realized that there might be a way to live the dream.” She struck up a correspondence with un Cuerno, who she credits as her mentor, freely sharing tips on how to live and work as a full-time unicorn.

At first, things were difficult. “Being a full-time unicorn is tough!” Badeau says. “You really miss your opposable thumbs, and a diet of grass and rainbows is a difficult adjustment for someone used to burgers and fries!” She started with part-time unicorning, on weekends and after hours, but soon found the courage to quit her 9-5 job and move into 40-hour unicorn weeks.

“There are some challenges,” admits Badeau. “You need people to help brush your coat, and driving anywhere requires a trailer and hitch. It’s difficult for people with hard hearts to see me, and I have an instinctive fear of non-virgins that I have to control with special veterinary medication.” But it’s all worth it, she says. “Especially with children. Asking if they can ride me or touch my horn and then seeing their faces when they’re able to…it’s the best feeling in the world!”

Lynn Badeau now lives and works full-time as a unicorn, taking only the occasional weekend or holiday off to “wear clothes, use fingers, and watch Netflix” for a change. While she’s coy about how much she charges per appearance (Badeau’s website has a price quote generator), she often works for free or at the behest of the Department of Natural Resources, teaching children about conservationism and the environment.

“I’m a nerd at heart,” Badeau says, noting that she has appeared as a guest in such respected shows as Dr. What, Blade Runner: The Series, and Star Trek the Third Generation. “I’m able to make a living with my dream and educate besides. What could be better than that?”

From an idea by breylee and this article.

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April 3, 2013

From “The JCVs” by Perri D. Kelley

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The diode implants were inexpensive and enough to keep inaction or an unhealthy diet from negatively impacting a person’s muscle mass and tone. Combine that with the burgeoning industry of “tweaking” babies by choosing the most attractive and ideal combination of their parents’ genes, and the conclusion was clear. The most recent generation had far more people that were in the highest tier of human attractiveness. They were also among the most highly educated generations in history, and enjoyed the benefits of unprecedented technological infrastructure.

Why, then, were they also some of the loneliest and most disconnected people in history?

Academic struggled with the facts for years. Generation A, to use the somewhat debased term that became popular in the media, had in theory every possible convenience and every reason to succeed. And yet they failed in droves, boomeranging home, crashing out of jobs, or struggling by on minimum wage slavery despite abundant opportunities. And the suicides…paramedics in major cities took to calling them “type A fatalities” with their peculiar brand of gallows humor

Most dire, though, was the epidemic of so-called JCVs, named after one Joyce Carol Vincent. Young, attractive, and highly educated people would sequester themselves in a tiny space, often ringed with computer monitors and other technology, and live their lives through the mediation of a glowing screen, only rising to use the restroom or to eat. And many of them died in that posture, either from wasting away or the long-term effects of a sedentary lifestyle that the diodes couldn’t help.

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April 2, 2013

From “The Smoke Hunt” by Jerry Eciruam

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The cul-de-sac along the side of the Goldsmith building had once held a condenser which had helped keep the loading dock cool even in the most blistering summer heat. With the new AC system located on the roof of the expansion added in 1997, the fenced-in area had become something very different.

A refugee camp.

Dr. Maarten, from the Department of Biology in abutting Peter Hall, knocked on one of the two wooden gates in the cul-de-sac wall. Both gate and wall were easily nine feet high and built from faded but sturdy pine.

An eyeball appeared at a knothole in the gate. “Password.”

“$5.75,” Maarten replied.

Whispers behind the pine. Dr. Maarten hoped he’d gotten the password right; it did fluctuate day by day, after all.

The door swung open. “You’re clean, come on in.”

Maarten gratefully joined the circle of other PhDs, graduate students, and other Southern Michigan University personnel who were already there. He pulled a battered carton of Marlboros–$5.75 a pack according to the sign at the Gas n’ Gulp just off campus–and lit a fresh coffin nail. Such was the lengths to which SMU’s campuswide ban on smoking had driven people. Someone had told Maarten that intelligent people like professors and lecturers should be smart enough to know better than to smoke; Maarten’s first instinct had been to punch that person in the face, since the nicotine content of his blood had been particularly low that day.

Another knock at the front gate. Maarten, as the most recent arrival, had gate duty. He peeked through the knothole and saw only a blue jacket.

“Password?”

“$11.90.”

That was the price of cigarettes in New York City, not Michigan; Maarten knew immediately thanks to blog posts and colleagues from the Big Apple that assumed their vice tax burden was shared by all.

As he pondered what to do, Maarten saw a flash of silver through through the hole. “It’s a raid!” he cried. “Cheese it!”

The front gate opened with a bang as the assembled smokers fled through the back. DPS officers swarmed into the smokers’ refugee camp, handcuffs ready, pepper spray and tasers in hand. The smokers tried to flee into the narrow allwyways between buildings, only to be confronted by mounted officers bearing down on them with nets and truncheons.

Only a few managed to escape the sweep, the rest being led back to the station in chains.

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March 31, 2013

From “Pysanky Memories” by Yevheniy “Max” Zelenko

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Grandma Kuzemchenko was, in many ways, already gone. She didn’t speak often, and even then only in the Ukrainian of her youth. She would sometimes violently spit and curse the Soviets, not realizing that the revolution that drove her family from their home had collpased in failure over 20 years ago. She often failed to recognize her children and grandchildren, which was perhaps the most distressing for her large and extended family, which refused to allow her to be placed into a home.

But she still remembered the traditions and skills that had been instilled into her at a young age. Cooking, cleaning, sewing…Grandma Kuzemchenko could be found doing all those things even if she no longer remembered where she was. But the pysanky, the traditional Ukrainian Easter eggs…those were the most special.

Every Easter–for Grandma Kuzemchenko did check her Orthodox calendar with its photographs of illuminated saints–she would raid the fridge for eggs and the emergency candle cupboard for wax. The old metal wax-pot and stylus were kept under her bed, just where they had been during her girlhood near Kharkov, and the family would awaken to see Grandma Kuzemchenko huddled over a carton of eggs and bowls of dye, with wax softening on the stove.

Using the stylus, each egg would be painted with bold geometric patterns or expressive and angular Orthodox motifs. Sometimes both. Grandma Kuzemchenko would work on the eggs in batches, drawing on the wax designs, dyeing, and wiping the wax away with a warm cloth, until fantastic pictures of haloed angels trumpeting Cyrillic blessings amid bold background patterns began to emerge. She wouldn’t stop, save to eat or sleep, for days.

When the pysanky were done, Grandma Kuzemchenko would carefully divide them up: this many for the priest, this many for the children, this many for the graves of loved ones, this many for a living room basket to ward off misfortune and bring good luck. Her family, as much as they were able, distributed the eggs according to her hand-written Ukrainian labels.

But when asked to share the secret of preparing her dyes and drawing her designs, or when asked if anyone else could join in, she would only say, in her mother tongue, “It is a secret to be passed from mother to daughter, and I have no daughters.”

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March 30, 2013

From “The Hamadryad at the Corner of 3rd and East” by Kenny C. F. Fletcher

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People tend to think, as the ancients did, that animating essences can only be generated by nature. The dryads inhabiting trees, the naiads submerged beneath bubbling brooks, the fickle spirits of wild and desolate places.

People tend to be wrong, as they so often are.

Any object with a purpose can serve as a physical anchor for something in the metaphysical world. Perhaps it’s best to think of them as emergent patterns in the code of life, ones perhaps not intended by nevertheless embraced by the great Programmer. They tend to come into being attached to older, well-used structures, the ones bathed by the psychic output of many vibrant lives passing by. Places like that have many lingering and lost pieces of life’s code to incorporate and evolve.

So that streetlight you see on the corner–the old one, ornate, from an age of craftsmen–may play host to a dryad of its own. A being of electricity and light, coming forth only on the darkest and hottest of summer nights, illuminating all in her footsteps.

You may also encounter the broken spirits, the lost, whose links have been severed through accident or demolition. Cursed to wander aimlessly until their energies dissipate back into the Universal Code.

In either case, you will never look at a humble streetlight, parking meter, or bus stop in the same way ever again.
Inspired by this.

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March 29, 2013

From “Movies with the Boss” by Volya Lagounov

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“It’s a note from the Boss.” The courier needed say nothing more as he handed over the note.

Nervously, Konstantinov and Polzin looked at each other and unfolded the missive.

Konstantinov & Polzin,

Join me in the Kremlin theater tonight for some movies. We’ll be hearing Commissar Bolshakov translate the new Howard Hawks cowboy movie Red River. Bring an appetite, as there will be dinner afterwards. We start at 10 o’clock sharp.

-JS

“Should we go?” Polzin said. “It’ll be well after midnight when the movie is over, and I hear that you get forced to drink Georgian wine at the dinner to make sure you don’t blurt out anything reactionary. The Boss will understand if we send our regrets, won’t he? He was a poet in his youth, surely he understands that, as ‘engineers of the human soul,’ our writing comes first?”

Konstantinov sighed. “You should know better than that. Do you know that the Boss put a stop to a translation of his poem into Russian? Beria had Pasternak–Pasternak!–translating it, and the Boss put the kibosh on it. I hear that he keeps Bukharin’s last note in his desk for sentimental reasons, but that didn’t keep the Boss from having him shot.”

“So if we know what’s good for us, we’ll go.”

“If we know what’s good for us, we’ll be the first ones there and the last ones to leave.”

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March 28, 2013

From “The Bernardshiv Recollection” by Robin F. D. Morgan

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Recently paroled convict Emmett “Blue” Blumenthal hitched a ride as far as Noxtub, and walked the rest of the way under the summer sun. The field, the elm, the fence…it was all as his friend Tim had described in prison.

It was a long, low wooden fence with a big old elm tree about halfway through. Tim was right; it was like something out of a poem by Wordsworth. “It’s where I proposed to my wife,” Tim had said before his escape. “I need you to make me a promise, Blue: if you make parole, if you escape…find that tree.”

Blue followed the fence and then paused near where it passed by the elm, as crickets and katydids jumped before him. He poked around in the roots, looking for what Tim had described…a piece of wood, West Indian mahogany, that had no right to be among Massachusetts alfalfa.

Luckily, mahogany withstood the elements better than most woods; Blue found it, mossy and wormy, and pried it up. “I buried something under that wood,” Tim had said in prison. “It’s something I left just for you.”

Sure enough, there was a Zeppelin-brand cigar box there in the soil; Blue pried it open, shooing away pillbugs and earwigs and a Massachusetts Jumping Spider. Inside was an envelope with some cash and a letter.

Dear Blue,

Hopefully you’ve gotten out and are reading this. I hope that, since you came this far, you’ll come a little farther. I could use your help on my new project.

You remember the name of the town, don’t you?

-Tim

Blue stared at the piece of paper, even turning it over to make sure there was nothing else on the other side.

“Aw, shit,” he said. Tim had told him about that town over ten years ago, once. Blue had no goddamn idea what it was called anymore.

With apologies to Frank Darabont and Stephen King.

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