Zankoku na haha no teeze

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Date: Sun, 2 Dec 2007 02:14:39 +0000 (UTC)

SEVEN YEARS A BIRD IN THE WOOD

Far out beyond the Western horizon you can walk through the rainforest until
you fall off the edge into the ocean, and if you go just a little further
beyond the surface you reach the point where it wraps back into the trees
again.  That's where the glaciers went; we only say they melted away because
we've forgotten how to see past the trees to that level.  The glaciers lie
like big, white, shorthaired dogs, incubating their eggs just a little,
enough to keep them alive, until the next ice age.  Then it'll be time for
the next generation to grow up.

Every so often one hatches early, because of incautious or impatient parents.

BUT IF YOU WANNA LEAVE TAKE GOOD CARE

Back here, back in the land where the Sun makes its home, the society of
glaciers has descended into decadence.  You wouldn't know from the inch or
so that coats the ground every Winter that this is what's left of beings who
made the Gods themselves cower in their mountain strongholds.  And who built
those mountains?  Who bore the Gods and taught them to kill?

The children and the young foolish enough to come here incautious would be
blinded by the snow, drugged by the powder and flake, and frozen and sublimed
into essential Winter.

SEVEN YEARS A FISH IN THE FLOOD

The railroad tracks are for all purposes and intents a superhighway now that
ordinary people can't afford to drive automobiles.  Twice a day the freight
train rumbles by with its tank cars full of sulfuric, nitric, and syrupy
phosphoric acids - DOT numbers UN1830, UN2031, and UN1805 respectively - and
good children hide behind the trees and cover their eyes in basic terror.
But most of the time they walk along the right-of-way as if the tracks were
just painted lines.  I have heard tell that down South where they got
farther with the whole superconducting maglev thing before running out of
coal, the tracks really are painted on the ground, and a whole team of
artists is kept employed 24 hours a day (using torches at night) repainting
them to keep them fresh.  The Gods forbid that one's commute should become
boring.

HOPE YOU FIND A LOT OF NICE THINGS TO WEAR

I told you before about the planet where the vegetable fibres are all black
and people have developed a system of selective bleaches to produce coloured
fabric.  That's a good one, but it's not as interesting as the planet
condensed from a nebula of almost pure silicon and oxygen; it lay dead,
orbiting a dwarf star for billions of years (this was all in your future, of
course) until colliding galaxies dragged the planet into orbit around a
young, virile yellow star which awakened the seeds of life trapped in the
crytalline crust.

Everything was quartz - enough crystals for the fluffbunnies to to launch a
whole galaxy's worth of Aquarian Ages.  You couldn't have seen a thing on
the surface of the crystal planet between the reflections and the
transparency, but the people who evolved there of course didn't think
anything was unusual about their environment.  Their clothes were all fibre
optics, and probably would have started a major fashion trend if they didn't
all hate each other far too much to invent language or fashion, and if they
didn't hate off-worlders even more.  Not nice people at all, those ones, and
it's just as well that a mischievous alien, not one of your descendants from
Earth but someone from somewhere very much like there, hadn't landed a
stolen starskimmer in the main square of what passed for a city and sung a
note so loud and pure that all who heard it were resonated into sand.  Do
you believe that story?

SEVEN YEARS TONGUE IN THE WARNING BELL

The worst part is that they'll take it away even if you've never had the
chance to use it yet.  They'll take it all away.  Time and oxide wait for no
man, and you'd better not be waiting for a woman who will never come.  She
hates that.

They'll take it away before it was ever yours to begin with, and not to use
themselves but just to rot on the garbage pile.  Landfill, get it?  Not even
compost!

But there's nothing you can do because if there were, what you have already
done would be it.  All you have to do is watch as it slips away.  Use it and
lose it or don't use it but lose it but you'll lose it either way.

The moral of that story about the fox is that the grapes really were sour,
just like he said.

BUT THEN A LOT OF NICE THINGS TURN BAD OUT THERE

Nitrogen pressure, check.  Truth and beauty, cross-check.  Fuel cell
amperage within normal range.  Cunnilingus online.  It's all licks and
promises, gentle men; you can flip off that countdown hold right about NOW.
Begin primary ignition, just like the man said on the Death Star.  Oh, dear
babes, if you were mine... but such a thing is both forbidden and promised.

At some point somewhere in the sequence the lies stop being promises and the
realities stop being lies.  She took her pen-knife, clean and sharp, and
thrust it through the layer of buttercream and the cake cried and bled and
was silent, oozing red strawberry filling.  All the fat faces lining up for
a slice and she couldn't bear to disappoint them.  She'd keep that promise if I
have to break all the others to do it.  No matter how many times she myself
were betrayed.

It does feel nice, she said.  Every girl should have one of these.  Lovely.
He just laughed, kept the tape rolling, and didn't care that the automatic
white balance was making her look like an alien being from some impoverished
backwater planet, a wild world where they couldn't even afford stable
vacuum dynamics, baby.

SEVEN YEARS IN THE FLAMES OF HELL

--
Matthew Skala, CS PhD candidate, University of Waterloo
mskala@math.uwaterloo.ca  <-- school
mskala@ansuz.sooke.bc.ca  <-- home
http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/   http://bonobo-conspiracy.ca/

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Copyright © 2007 Matthew Skala
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