Ella Richie Teresa DeMaria

Illustrated by Amy C Godliman

“A BILLION BROKEN BACKS” — that was the headline. Griswald looked over this headline and confirmed the paper's suspicions when he looked out the window. There, he saw all the city's employees hard at work to prevent further damage: concrete mixers and steamrollers bandaging the fissured sidewalks, hard-hatted men cautiously caulking the ground ahead and behind them, policemen tracing the trail of runaway refrigerators, ambulances hovering for the few moms on crew.

Seven days before, the hospital had welcomed a strange and sudden influx of mothers with broken backs and snapped spines, many of whom screamed, in a great and vengeful agony, the names of their children, it was learned. A few connected dots and bureaucratic scrambles later, the municipal forces had diagnosed the problem — cracks and lines in the pavement, mainly — and rushed to fix the streets. A team of researchers concluded that any footfall upon any such break would damage maternal vertebrae.

These lethal lines would have been enough to paralyze a city into tiptoeing paranoia, but with these broken backed mothers came other injured: the pathologically dishonest arrived with third degree burns from the waist down; forest workers hobbled in with skeletons shattered by sticks and stones; the professionally and habitually projectile- or insult-hurtling members of society came besmacked with the rebounded stings, labels, and objects of their trade — bruised bullies, quarterbacks adhered with footballs, and de-esteemed stand-ups all struggled to regain confidence upon therapists' couches.

With the seeming realization of so many children's rhymes and sayings, the world at large turned to horror. Kids, who had before embodied innocence, purity, and unawareness, had apparently become, or had been all along, beholders of ancient wisdoms, purveyors of terrible truths, keepers of violent secrets. Perhaps they had caused all this; perhaps the same collective unconscious murmurings that somehow caused identical recess games to evolve on playgrounds across the nation was part of a deeper and more sinister psychic network. More than a few congressman and public figures of note had called for some kind of action, such as a nationwide FBI investigation of every single child and adolescent under age 18, or a complete ban on rhyme at the primary level of education, or even child interment camps and quarantines. Child therapists and pediatricians became the nation's most valued asset, but not even they could explain what was going on.

Everyone was scared.

To be continued

The God Particle

October 25, 2017

Originally written in 2011 or 2012

Time shed itself, and no sound foretold the flaking scenery, and no forewarning bespoke beyond the dead superstition of a tribe long ago, and no gospel could voice the quick crumbling of a world.

And there was a woman of many years, named Evelyn, who knew just as her children would age as she, who knew their end as well as hers, marveled still at their emerging wrinkles. And though she knew time would one day flag its obvious flares upon her body, she gasped in the mornings at the way her limbs hurt from shock and wear. And she knew one day she would die, and the world sometime further down the line, but as her belief proved itself upon that final day, she asked to the sky, What good has my knowing done?

And the ground and trees evaporated like rain recoiled into the clouds, and lifted into the highest thinning reaches. And the tumbling, unspooling world came towards her house, and the sidewalks unthreaded from the streets, and the greens rose from their grasses, and a titanic black nothing dwelt in their absence.

And Evelyn had no time to scream or call her children or do anything else. And she could think, I, I have learned a lot, I have prayed a decent deal, I could make sense enough of the living world, but precious little, if this is what the world has come to, and to herself she said, Maybe I had not done enough.

And then, the world ended.

The world ended very instantaneously, but Evelyn did not. With something shorter than a blink, Evelyn found herself still material and whole, still thinking, and, she realized, slowly orbiting around the weight of her confusion, legs somersaulting above and below. She was tumbling in space — space like the astronauts had roamed, space that nightly routine, and she let out a long, long scream, and it was just an open mouthed void, like everything out there.

And she was still she, but she was all alone.

In the many countless days thereafter, the shock at last wore off, and Evelyn began to recognize as company the same bright lodes that rose and set on the occasional seasons of the world that had been. And she recognized, far more brilliant now than before, the mysterious cloudy band of galaxy flexed in the dark, braceleted by the same constellations and starry jewels. And as time wore on, she felt she could sense some personality in her nearest planetary neighbors, and she felt a kinship towards them as she had felt towards her old earthly friends.

And Evelyn became accustomed. She spent her existence rolling over the same questions of existence she had contemplated upon Earth. And in that comforting cushion of space, she fell into a permanent half-rest, one like the cozy state of subconscious between waking and sleeping. And she became so accustomed she barely noticed the stardust speckling her hair, and did not notice how in a short few thousands of years her skin had taken on a magmic and eruptive quality, and how the water of her eyes and in the mass of her cells would in some millions later spill outward into the remainder of her being, and Evelyn was too happily poised in her unanswered wonderings to notice the formation of an answer.

Scenes In The Life Of Rupert Gills, Born With the Head of a Fish

October 25, 2017

Illustrated by Amy C Godliman

DISCOVERY

One windy morning, Fiona Gills walks on the beach when she sees an unusual creature tumbling in the surf. She walks close to the thing and is greeted by the strangest sight: a baby boy with the head of a fish. The baby moves with the confused inarticulations of a natural accident, at times flopping and at times seeming to crawl. Fiona looks for passersby on the beach, then sweeps the fishchild up in her shawl and goes on her way.

"I will call you Rupert," she says.

SWIM CLASS

Little Rupert Gills excels in swim class. Outfitted with floaties like the rest of the kids, Rupert soon proves his aquatic aptitude, snaking through the water as the other kids kick at the surface. He stays under for impressively long durations, to the terror of a few young lifeguards, who pull Rupert out several times. "Oh, he just does that," his mother Fiona says to the concerned staff. "He has gills and human lungs, you see, and can breathe well in and out of pool." She continues his enrollment because he likes the water.

KIDS CAN BE CRUEL

Pete Ganz and Patrick Magnuson can barely hold their giggles in as they slip a fish hook into the PB&J. "Quick," Pete says, "he's coming."

Into the cafeteria walks the freakish Rupert Gills, who won't stop looking weird no matter how many conditionings and tolerance talks the teachers give.

"Hey Rupe!" Patrick calls to the fish. "Here, I made this for you."

He carries the sandwich to Rupert while Pete hides behind with fishing line in hand. Rupert, surprised, takes the sandwich and starts to feast. Pete waits for the right bite then tugs on the line, jerking Rupert from the jaw.

The two bullies cackle until Rupert very shortly begins to make horrible choking noises, gagging on blood no doubt, and what seemed like an innocent prank to the two sixth graders turns into this really miserable ordeal for everyone involved. The school nurse intervenes, then the principle, and Pete and Patrick are never seen again at River View Elementary.

Rupert, meanwhile, learns to take advantage of having an eye on each side of his head. Bullies stop attempting to approach him from behind. He may be feeble, they learn, but he can see you.

SHAVING

Rupert does not have to, actually.

A BIG HIT WITH SIGMA ALPHA EPSILON

Rupert decides to join a frat as a freshman at UCLA. He rushes for Sigma Alpha Epsilon and, like everyone, is hazed. The dudes pull out their usual assortment of embarrassing initiations, blindfolds and absurd alcoholic consumption and so on, and are amazed to see just how well Rupert can endure the usually devastating water hazing. He can drink and drink and drink water and never let up.

So Rupert becomes a minor celebrity at SAE and is seen at all the big frat parties. People find him endearing. When he drinks too much beer he does that gasping thing fish do out of water and people get alarmed, but otherwise the general consensus is that he's pretty chill to have around.

THE BLIND DATE

In his second year at UCLA, a couple of friends set Rupert up on a blind date with a girl named Carla Stump. "You guys'll get along famously," the friends say. They set the two up to eat at Santori Sushi — her favorite.

Rupert arrives first. He gets some weird looks; he ignores them. He doesn't mind eating other fish.

He sees a chubby girl dressed very nicely sitting solo, walks up to her, and asks: "Carla?"

Carla's eyes widen. "Is this some kind of sick joke?!" She rises from her seat and shrieks to the sushi chefs. "What kind of sick fucks would do this to me?!" Her eyes are pearled with tears.

"Carla, wait —" Rupert, not knowing what to do, grabs her and goes in for a kiss.

She vomits all over his suit.

"Leave me alone," she manages, and storms out the restaurant.

Rupert later learns that Carla has been set up on numerous nightmare dates like this. He begins to wonder what his friends really think of him.

WISTFUL MOMENTS

Rupert, 26, goes to the beach the afternoon after Fiona Gills' funeral. Tears drip from his scales. This is where she found him, she told him towards the end of her life, but though Rupert did not actually come from his mother, this did not make her love him any less.

Rupert, on the shore, feels he belongs neither on the land nor the ocean ahead. All he feels is the incredible throb of longing for the home he lost.

TRUE LOVE?

Rupert sits at the bus stop. He works now for Sierra Fisheries. Somehow — he could not say exactly how — he knew where all the commercial fish schooled, and has proven to be a valuable resource for the company.

A woman sits next to him. She has a head of tentacles, big black eyes, and speaks from a beak. "Excuse me," she says. "I'm new here. Will the 319 take me to the harbor?"

"Yes it will," Rupert says. "That's where I'm headed."

"Wonderful," she says.

So finally, at 35, Rupert's life starts to make a little more sense.

The Lonely People Are Getting Lonelier

October 25, 2017

Eliot scrolls down the Craiglist personals looking for instant company. Each ad reads as an index of lonely fantasies, open invites closed in a system: men seek real men, men seek straight men, tops seek bottoms seek tops, dads seek sons. They don't know Eliot, but maybe they seek him, too.

Few reply.

Eliot finds a match and drives, heart convulsing, into the empty dark. He is 17, maybe the best thing going for him. His parents don't know where he is, but then, they never do.

He meets his man at his front door, a red-faced and softly featured Santa. "Come in," he says, already putting an arm around his new companion.

The two dwell uncertainly in the man's bedroom, until Eliot asks, "What do you want me to do?"

"You can take off your clothes now," the man says, and Eliot obliges, and goes to the bed, and feels bony and cold.

The man does his thing and Eliot stares at the ceiling. After a while the pudgy guy finishes, and nestles his hairy and stunted body against Eliot's. He kisses his boy on the lips. "Have you done this before? You're more comfortable than most guys. A lot of inexperienced guys tense up, they won't kiss." Eliot doesn't reply.

The man ushers his encounter out of his house and says he will call soon. Eliot nods and drives home.

On his way Eliot looks at the passing city cut into a glowing grid. He wonders how it's possible to feel so alone in such a big city and thinks about all the other people calling out into the dark. He thinks of all the collisions between people craving contact, and thinking of all this, he only feels lonelier.

Love Song of the Involute Shell

October 25, 2017

"Our love was written long ago, my dear," said the captain to his mermaid lass, but speaking to the horizon, "in the shells and chambers of the deep."

He puffed his pipe. "As a young skipper upon these waters, I used to fear the churning sea. She seemed to me unending in her heartlessness and indifference — the dull repetition of wave after wave! She would swallow us and we, too, would be reduced to nothingness, another temporary speck in the mighty blue. The older I have grown, however, the more I see in her the patterns of love. Yes, my dear, love! A love as deep as the ocean herself."

He gazed out at the setting sun. "Imagine, if you will, life in prehistoric times. Imagine a terrifying abyss of chaos — amoebae splitting and mutating without order, currents without continents to curb them. Pure chaos! A world in constant upheaval!"

He glared, with great purpose, at the repeating waves. "But formlessness needs form to guide it, else it shall continue to mutate without end. And so, out of necessity, came shells! Protective shapes to shape the shapeless, outer bones to bind the boneless! Beginning at the smallest point, a core of simplicity, began a shell, a shell which through maturation birthed additional septa. So grew this shell, logarithmically, towards a living chamber, and hence the cephalopod. Life is built in simple steps, you see."

He puffed again on his pipe. "It has seemed to me that life is written by a single rule: reproduction. That is why the waves give birth to waves, and why our time upon this blue beast in so small a wooden craft will one day, to our children's children, be a footnote; we are mere ancestors already."

He smiled to a flock of seagulls flying in sync overhead. "But, Captain — you must be thinking — is not this the same meaninglessness you so feared? Is not this unending reproduction but sister to the ocean's monotony? Perhaps — but I prefer to think of it differently. For does this pattern not manifest itself in so infinite a variety of shapes? The world is not monotonous, but a complexity of endlessly beautiful variations on a single principle! And that principle, my dear, is love. Love, the ever-beating heart of the whole; love, the common factor between opposites; love, the simple origin point that births the world!"

He outstretched his arms to the horizon. "For is it not love between man and woman that creates each and everyone one of us? Was it not with love that God created out of shapeless sand the first human upon this earth? Is it not love that connects contraries, love that warms us in the harsh winter, love that seems, by my reckoning, to be the final conclusion of every creed, belief, and wish?"

He put his arm around his mermaid lass. "And so like the nautilus, my dear, we are formed from the beginning by this simple rule, and no matter how long and windy our road, however complicated our union, you shall trace in our stages the same lovely pattern, and you shall arrive, after so many revolutions, at a single starting point: love. What say you, my fair maiden?"

The mermaid shrugged. "You're weird," she said, and dove into the sea.

Ruinology

October 25, 2017

Illustration by Amy C Godliman

"Everything is a gate," you once said to me, and your words are some of the few things I have managed to hold onto.

In all my walks I could not ever recall seeing your gallery until that January evening. I do not know how I could have overlooked it. You were in there at your reception desk, reading a book, with a large mauve sun hat and a drapery of long black hair. I surveyed the collection of newly made antiques, the new paintings of old myths and the nostalgic pottery. I complimented your collection and left.

I began to visit regularly. I told you it was a sure sign of my old age that I spent my after-work walks seriously perusing a gallery of expensive imitations and Southwestern-themed niceties. You laughed then beckoned me to the backroom with your bejeweled fingers. You had a secret to share, you said.

You presented a dusty painting of a "magic ring," a painting, you insisted, that was authentically old. This was your most valuable possession, you said, and for whatever reason you passed it into my hands and insisted I go home with it. "With this, you will have access to every entrance in the city, and you will leave no trace of your break-ins," you said. "You will become invisible."

On my next walk I decided to test your forewarning in the hopes of joking about it on my next visit. To my surprise, my first attempt, the locked Joey's Barber Shop, gave way, and I stood flabbergasted amongst the unwatched combs and hair gels. I felt very alarmed and ensured I left everything as I had found it. Could this work everywhere? I wondered.

My curiosity got the best of me and I went on a night-time prowl with my newfound power. I learned the contents of private storage spaces; I tiptoed through countless apartments; I toured the gemstones exhibit at the natural history museum. I was entirely unaccounted for. I had access to a secret world. I began to know the innards of a city that, until now, I only saw from the outside. Now I was deep within.

I expected my mischief would catch up to me. I awaited police phone calls or security team apprehensions, but no matter how many cameras saw me, no matter how many alarm systems I ghostily passed through, I heard nothing. As you said, I had become invisible.

Inspired, I lived out an early childhood fantasy and made slight disturbances across the city. I skipped work to restyle and reconfigure mannequins in the Macys storefront. I missed appointments to move cars. I stole the finest wines. No matter how much I altered, I was neither seen nor stopped. In daylight and under moonlight, I may as well have been thin air.

The city took on the feel of a ruin: open and accessible, marked by inhabitance but mine to explore without witness or admonition. I was the chartered tourist of distant lives.

After my intrusion bender, I returned to your gallery to talk but could not get in. The door was locked. You were in there talking with a new customer. I saw you presenting to her the most terrifying thing: an ancient portrait of a man who looked very much like myself. I knocked loudly on the glass, shouting and questioning. You turned your gaze to mine, smiled, and then resumed your conversation.

I returned to my apartment for the first time in days, and was locked out of my own home, too. I made every attempt to enter, and called every contact I could — landlord, neighbors, police — to no answer. I realized, then, what you had done to me: in granting me access to every door, you shut me out from my life. In letting me plumb the worlds within our world, I had ceased to exist as I was.

To this day, I remain shut away from my old life. The unsold painting stands in your window. My likeness mocks me from behind glass.

I have lost interest in breaking indoors. I kick up dust in alley ways and look at the lives still lived, defined by what they can and cannot access, as I slink between gates and barriers, the bottom feeder of a common abyss.

She Pulls the Strings

October 25, 2017

Mr. Hartford Bickley gazed upon the geese and grouse in his yard; his wife, Elinor, meanwhile, only saw these fowl through an obstructing window pane. So went their summer days: the artful conversationalist surveying his property with his friend Walter in tow; his quiet wifely companion, removed and afar. The two only united upon the husband’s return when he, fresh from a hunt, would demand food and drink, and she would oblige, alone in the kitchen with sorrow as her only true companion, sorrow for a marriage that once held so much promise, sorrow for the vacancies and recognized barriers between man and wife.

Until one day, when, having tired of contemplating the mocking greenery beyond the household walls, Elinor retired to her husband’s vast library, where she found, curiously tucked into one volume, a long, thin, black string, spooling from the pages. She opened the book to where this string was threaded and found there its termination; the rest of the string trailed to floor, to shelf, then seemingly to ceiling, then yet beyond, further up, threaded through the skylight and to the roof of the estate house. Like a cat she toyed with the string — a few tugs — and then left the mystery to rest.

That evening, her husband returned bruised and distraught. He spoke of a phantom force tugging upon his neck, as if he were ensnared by a noose. He was dragged, he said, by an unseen instigator, thrown this way and that under a ghostly chokehold. Elinor, recalling the string, understood her newfound power, yet kept quiet, choosing instead to dissuade her husband from indulging superstitions. “There are occasions when our bodies seem to work contrary to our minds, and may give us the most misleading signals, the most inscrutable urges, that neither you nor I nor any physician can accurately account for; we must accept these short bursts of instability as one of the inconveniences of being alive,” she said.

And so it went, she feigning the role of unaware wife, he becoming the newly troubled and damaged husband. No longer could he stroll through his estate without the occasional ensnarement; no longer could he circle the pond without fear of being yanked round its perimeter, as if made the sole competitor in a perverse hippodrome. In short time, the fearful man sheltered in the estate and took to more productive hobbies, cooking and general upkeep, out of suspicion his idleness had inspired some godly wrath; while good Elinor, ever the quiet one, continued to pluck gently at the string as needed, the silent looser of unseen knots, the tinkerer of worldly rules.

The Weekend Girl Cloud

October 25, 2017

The weekend girl cloud blinks across the pink sky to deposit cartoonily exaggerated rain drops, blue with a badge of reflective iridescence, on the land below. The candy children, in button up dresses made of animator cells, stitched with cheesy cliche dreams about flying, about showing up naked in class, and about lost loved ones, celebrate to their venerated revenant above. The grass, of course, is sheened like green butterscotch suckers. All is glassy glee in the land rained upon by the weekend girl cloud.

This is the usual scene.

The problem with the weekend girl cloud, so worshiped by so many, is that she harbors the wet spirits of all my fantasy crushes. I should say, that's my problematic relationship with the weekend girl cloud. I am reassured by the automaton mechanicals that I will outgrow my pubescent ideas and one day stick to earthly pleasures. Obviously, they have never been a 17 year old boy.

On this particular weekend I wait upon the hillside for the sky to smear across its palette. Then in comes the girl cloud. She sparkles Powerpuff style. Her rain bubbles down, intermixing the colors and the forces that mold them. A chorus of candy children hobble under her shadow, arms skyward, feet springing them off the green crystal grass. They offer to make a Skittles sacrifice. The weekend girl cloud beams and rains down to heal their cheeks and crops.

I get jealous. I run out into the field, painted poppies tumbling up into the air behind me, and I shout: "Weekend girl cloud! I bring you more than these petty worshipers can offer. I bring you love!" I crash through the chorus of candy children and unpeel my shirt, fall to my knees, and sing an eternal love song.

The weekend girl cloud has an eye for sincerity and hoists me up. I am lifted by little winglets of rainwater. I am misted into her folds and greeted by my heavenly hosts. They are more transparent and spooky than I anticipated. They pilot a bright vessel but they are like dull candles. I say to them, "Hi, I am in love with you." That is the most creative I can be at 6000 feet in the air.

They all speak in unison in the most thunderous whisper: "WE LOVE YOU MORE."

With that, I am ejected on a tornado's twirl. I spiral to the ground flecked with dewey love. I land and look around at the bewildered candy children. I grab the nearest kid, a pigtailed girl with countless freckles. "I have tasted divine love and it is beautiful," I say. "I have never felt more adored. You crave the rains, but I — I have felt the cloud's real power."

The girl grabs me back by the shoulders. She pierces me with very wide eyes. "We have all been inside. Each and every one of us. We aren't a cult, mister. We are bunch of lovesick individuals each pleading his or her pain. And I know in my heart the cloud girls love me more than all others. So get on your knees and beg, mister. She's only taking one of us."

My eyes widen. I let go of my revelator. I look up and start yelling upwards like the rest of them. I have been yelling ever since.

Background

October 25, 2017