The Best of Electric Velocipede

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by John Klima


  The most extreme formed a rebel sect called the Weeders. They wove strands of kelp around their eyestalks and ritually cut their seventh arms, searing the wounds with a mixture of brine and gull guano. At first, they outlet their rage onto symbolic targets: dumb unblended seabirds, or rocks shaped like dolphin men. And then a juvenile Weeder called Long Stalks found an injured seal man bleeding on the beach and dragged him home in time for the evening convocation. The Weeders tore him to pieces, rubbing themselves with his blubber and parading in his fur. The meat they left to rot.

  When they discovered the decaying corpse, the crab matrons went to the seal men with offerings and apologies, but the seal men refused to hear diplomacy. They clipped off the delegation’s claws and sent the mutilated ambassadors home with a terse condemnation: “You didn’t even have the courtesy to eat him.”

  It was a matter of years before seal and crab men hunted each other to extinction. The last crab man sidled four hundred miles inland to a camp of parrot men before expiring with a curse on his lips.

  Soon it was hyena man versus eagle man and frog man versus capybara man, then tiger and spider and cockatiel men against snake and giraffe and ostrich men. Amidst the hectic formation and betrayals of alliances that seethed on the battlefield, only one order created a stable federation. These were the insect men, greatest of all the species of men in their variety and achievements.

  Their infantry were the mosquito men, fearsome female warriors with the muscular bodies of Amazons topped by tiny, blood-sucking heads. They marched wherever battle raged, drinking the blood of fallen soldiers. They were sliced and swatted, crushed and grasped in giant crocodilian jaws, but still the indomitable parasites survived to carry samples of their victim’s blood back to their superiors, the butterfly men.

  Oh, the tragedy of the butterfly men, wisest of the insect men, whose useless jewel-colored wings draped from their slender shoulders like robes. These were the descendents of the geneticists who engineered the destruction of mankind, innocent victims of their ancestors’ self-flagellation. Forced to subsist on honey and chained to a lifespan of less than a week, these shrewd but ephemeral leaders did not even enjoy the consolation of flight. Instead they lingered in forest glades looking pale and melancholy. Liable to terrible moods, they made love in the underbrush one moment and shredded each other’s wings the next.

  Yet the geneticists’ legacy was not entirely bad, for they had left their descendents the gift of instinct: inscribed into the rapid pathways of their ephemeral brains lay an intricate understanding of DNA and genetic manipulation. Using this knowledge, the butterflies divined their enemy’s secret anatomical weaknesses from the blood samples which the mosquito men brought to them. Generations of butterfly men scrutinized each vial in order to create fatal viruses which would massacre their enemy’s ranks.

  Only when the last disease had been designed did the butterfly men let loose the fruits of their labor. Simultaneously, a hundred deadly plagues seized their victims, sweeping across the earth in a single night. By morning, only the insect men remained.

  High on an isolated cliff in a desert that had once been the Amazon, a cluster of hardy Joshua trees broke their ancient silence to speak once more. Wind rushed through the prickly tufts of their leaves, rustling out a single sentence: That didn’t take long, did it?

  Part Three—The Reign of Insects

  Though the butterfly men’s cunning won the war, their flighty emotions and brief lifespans made them unsuitable for leading a world, and so it was that the cockroach men became the rulers of the earth. Tough enough to survive dismemberment because their brain processes were spread throughout their becarapaced bodies, and possessed of the keen and supernatural senses of scavengers who had once lived among creatures many hundreds of times their own size, the cockroaches had the desire and capacity to enact a reign of fascism on the other insect men the likes of which had never been seen before.

  Ant men and bee men filled the roles of farmers and drudges. Atlas and rhinoceros beetle men provided brute force. Flea and mite men accomplished those tasks requiring agility.

  Mosquito men served as the secret police. The cockroach men sent them to swarm on enemies of the state and drain them dry—and there was never a lack of traitors to keep them fed.

  Alas, the plight of the butterfly men was only to become worse, for the cockroach men were loathe to risk the same end which had befallen their enemies. To ensure their safety from the butterfly’s dangerous knowledge, they imprisoned the butterfly men in a dark chain of underground caves where they lived their brief, miserable lives out of reach of the sun. Within a season and twelve generations, all conscious knowledge of how to create viruses from blood was gone, but the butterfly men’s unhappy descendents remain incarcerated in their underground cells today.

  Above ground, bees and ants marched to the cockroach’s well-timed rhythm, carrying crops from outlying farms into the hills of the city. Caravans of traveling gypsy moth men departed each hour on the hour, and the cockroach men began great civil works projects to erect bridges and statues and roads and memorials and temples. Larvae were taken away from their hatchers and forced to work at back-breaking labor past adulthood; dragonfly men journalists reported only that news which drifted on the prevailing winds of fascism; hives were routinely broken up to redistribute the working population. While the other insect men lived poor and wintry lives subsisting on meager grain, the cockroach men gorged on honey, orange peels and moldy bread. Those who dissented disappeared, only to be found as blood-drained corpses swinging from sturdy branches.

  Yet all this might have endured, were it not for the deadliest sin of the cockroach men. Ancestrally predisposed to look favorably upon debris, the cockroach men allowed their wastes to build up in giant landfills here. Junkyards choked out the fields; garbage seeped into the ground water; rotting trash provided breeding grounds for the nastiest, most virulent epidemics and hemorrhagic fevers. When the first wave of ant men died of a plague that turned their exoskeletons scarlet, at first the cockroach men suspected their old accomplices the butterfly men, but when they went to interrogate them, no one could remember where that unhappy species had been stashed.

  The trees cried out against what was happening to them. New bacteria chewed through leaves and blocked out photosynthesis; roots withered in poisoned soil. Things would only get worse, they knew—oh, how they would suffer. Across the globe it would be the same for all things natural: seas would rumble, ecosystems shatter; even the iron-breathing archeans in the deepest volcanic vents would perish if the cockroach men were allowed to continue on their path. This will hurt you too, Earth, the trees wailed, not in the language of wind-in-leaves which they had used to communicate with the humans, but in the language of roots-in-ground and life-in-soil.

  And the earth heard their plight. It shivered, cracking the super-continent down the middle like a slice of lightning splitting the sky. I have seen enough of mankind’s ability to make trouble, it rumbled to itself in the language of magma-under-crust, and it initiated the seventh apocalypse, the Apocalypse of Darkness.

  The Apocalypse of Darkness was the most terrible yet suffered by mankind. Untold agony wiped out almost the entire population of the globe.

  Three cricket men survived. They woke quaking into the dawn, antennae shivering down their backs. They were two females and a male, and they might have carried their line into future generations, but the three of them regarded each other with dark, compound eyes that reflected the same understanding.

  “We must never bear children,” said the oldest and wisest, “Or someday we might tell them what we have experienced, and we must never damn another soul to see what we have seen, even by picturing it in their minds.”

  The others agreed, and the three of them leapt off the tallest cliff they could find, dying in silence. Though the details of the Apocalypse of Darkness are known, it would be disrespectful to the cricket men’s sacrifice to record them.

  Inte
rlude—Whisperings from Branch to Branch

  So, little rootlings, little seedlings, little starting-to-grows, that is why the earth is quiet now. Feel the snails trail across your bark. Listen to the birds trilling in your branches and the insects nibbling your leaves. Hear the snap of monkeys brachiating from branch to branch. With mankind gone, we are free to enjoy these things. Are they not good?

  Ah, but by now you’ve guessed, the time of man is not entirely behind us. Why else would we whisper this tale on a fine spring morning, with winter’s frosts sweetly behind us?

  Before the Apocalypse of Darkness, we did not tell each other stories. Through necessity, we have learned the skill. Next year, you will help us tell the starting-to-grows about The Great Cathedral Mother who stood in the center of the world until her children sprouted up in a ring around her and sucked up all the sunlight. Her trunk remains where she once grew, swollen with dead leaves and congealing sap and blind grubs. Someday, lightning will strike all the way through the earth, piercing her in two, and each half will grow into a tall, straight pine with a tip like a spear: one going up, one going down. And when this happens, everything we think we know about the world will change. The year after that, we will tell the great love story of The Garlanded Tree and the hive of bees who fertilized her.

  But this is our most important tale. Like winter, man will return in his season. By the time he does, little rootling, you may have a great solid trunk like your mother. Or perhaps you will have grown and perished, and it will be your children standing. Or your children’s children. Whoever grows when mankind returns must remember how to drop their leaves and huddle naked in the snow.

  And also, when man comes back, we wish to return to him his history so that he may hold and regard it like a spring bloom budding on a new-leafed branch, new and yet also old, a gift not unlike the one given last spring. Who knows? Maybe this will be the time mankind can learn from stories.

  Part Four—Hands Yearning Upward Through the Surface of the Earth

  Stretch your roots into the ground, little seedlings. Listen. Can you hear life rustling under the soil?

  Who else, but the butterfly men? The Apocalypse of Darkness did not faze them. Having become accustomed to their miserable state, they could no longer be depressed by the black. They crept anxiously through their underground dwellings, their bright wings beautiful and unseen, and whispered to each other, “Do you feel that? What’s happening?”

  When the Apocalypse was over, without knowing the reason for it, the butterfly men cried together for twenty-four full hours in cosmic mourning for the human race of which they were now the sole representatives. But since their quixotic moods were often given to fits of communal sorrow, they failed to understand the uniqueness of the occasion.

  After that, it was as though a pall had lifted from the butterfly men. They no longer had surface cousins to envy, so they went about making their lives in the dark. Their society flourished. Their stymied flight sense muddled their sense of direction, so they built joyously in all directions, not knowing up from down or left from right. They laughed and fought and made love in the mud and created an entire caste system based on the texture of the useless flight powder that dusted their wings.

  Sometimes an unusual prophet among them dreamed of the surface and spoke of things called light and sun, and usually she was buried alive—but occasionally she wasn’t, and then a new religion started and some of the butterflies marched off through the dark to pursue their cult in a different set of caves.

  In the past millennium, these cults have gained power. Everyone has lost a sister or a cousin or a parent to their undeniable allure. Whispers among the fine-powdered aristocracy indicate that the cults have even gained sympathy among the inbred monarchy in their velvet-draped cocoons. Soon perhaps, every butterfly will believe.

  The cults employ a diverse array of dogmas, rituals, taboos, gods and mythologies, but they all share two common traits. All tell of an eighth apocalypse when the earth will open up into a chasm so terrifying that it will unlock a new sensation—a sixth sense—to accompany hearing, smell, touch, taste and desire. And all require their devotees to spend one day of their week-long lives meditating to discern which direction is up, and then to raise their arms toward it, and start digging.

  Recipe for Survival

  Sandra McDonald

  Brewis is a traditional dish from Newfoundland. It’s pronounced just like one of the black-and-blue marks your father’s grip has left on your arm and when properly prepared comes out as a thick, fishy mush. Your grandfather usually cooks it but on this fine summer day you’re fixing it alone for the first time and want to make sure it comes out exactly right.

  First you break apart the hard biscuits (also called hard tack) that Grandpa’s sister sends down now and then from St. John’s. Soak them overnight in a large pan of cold water. Do not use the pan that Grandpa uses to soak his calluses and corns. Do not use soft biscuits that you can buy locally. Hard biscuits are made with wheat flour and water but no leavening agent, and on sailing ships of yore, when your kind would come to slaughter my kind, they could last for entire voyages without spoiling. Try to eat one without softening it first and you’ll break all your teeth.

  Next, make sure you have fresh cod on hand. Salted cod can be used as a substitute, but must be soaked overnight in a separate pan. Fresh fish is usually in supply because the year is 1952 and your father, despite his disability, unloads each day’s catch on the Boston piers. But sometimes he forgets to bring his work home with him. Sometimes he forgets to come home at all. Grandpa is much more reliable. He welds iron at the navy yard and has done the household cooking for as long as you remember. He prowls his lime-green kitchen wearing a sleeveless T-shirt and sucking on Camel cigarettes. At dinnertime he fries steaks or boils hot dogs and asks you how your day was at school. If Dad is home, he’ll be drinking a six-pack of Schlitz in the living room and cursing at the news coming out of Korea. Eight years ago he lost his right hand attacking Germans in Normandy. Sometimes you have nightmares about that hand digging its way out of the dark French soil, swimming across the Atlantic and knocking on your door in the middle of the night. If your mother were around you’d go to her when the nightmares wake you, but she’s been gone since she walked into the freezing cold ocean at Christmas in 1948.

  Your father’s hand, dear one, would never make it across the ocean. If the sharks didn’t eat it, I would.

  Come morning, after the man from Hood’s Dairy has left two half-gallon bottles of fresh milk on the stoop, add salt to the softened biscuits and bring to a near-boil. If you’re using salted fish, change the water and boil for twenty minutes. If you’re using fresh fish, cut into pieces and bake with salt pork for twenty minutes. (Salt pork is fat from the belly of a hog. In 1965 you will become a vegetarian and swear off all animal and fish products. In 1978 you will relax your rules enough to occasionally eat lobster, which your then-husband calls the “cockroach of the sea.” There are worse things in the deep, things that crawl and fight and cower.)

  Sometimes Grandpa prepares recipes from Newfoundland that do not involve fish or fat. Of these, toutons are your favorite. Toutons are pieces of dough rolled out with flour and deep-fried in an inch of heavily salted vegetable oil. The fried dough they sell at county fairs is airier and not as satisfying, and the Dutch funnel cakes you will sample on a trip to Pennsylvania are far too sweet. Properly made toutons (thick, slightly chewy, golden brown on each side) are best served cut open with slabs of fresh butter melting inside. You will never get skinny eating toutons for breakfast.

  Nor will you ever get skinny if Grandpa has his say. He makes you scrape clean every plate of food and drink three tall glasses of milk each day. You have heard Mrs. Stevens next door say, “So tragic, that girl with no woman to raise her,” and though Grandpa can’t help you sew a skirt or warn you about menstruation, he’s determined to make sure you’re at least properly nourished. Sometimes he and your father go days
without speaking to one another, and sometimes when you’re supposed to be asleep you hear them fighting. At times like that you pull your pillow over your head and think of your mother in the ocean, her bones in the stomachs of whales, her hair entwined in seaweed that floats around the world.

  Step four of Grandpa’s recipe: Drain the near-boiled soaked biscuits and mix with the fish. Make sure there are no bones in the fish. Although brewis is excellent on its own, you may also add bacon or onions or scrunchions, which are bits of salt pork fried up in a pan.

  Once you asked Grandpa why he adds salt to everything. He said that’s just the way things were back in Pouch Cove. (Pouch is pronounced “pooch,” as in dog. Every Christmas you ask for a puppy, but the answer is always no.) Pouch Cove is a small coastal town north of St. John’s where, each spring, icebergs float by on the bay. In the March of 1914, when he was sixteen years old, Grandpa left home to go swiling on a steamship. He was one of a hundred and thirty men who were left stranded on the ice fields during a vicious blizzard. Seventy-eight of them froze to death or drowned in the sea, but Grandpa found me in my royal lair, I who rule all the creatures of the ice. He slit me open with his knife; I clawed him from neck to hip. Twined together on the ice, our hearts’ blood merged. After he was rescued, he traded the frozen seas for a blowtorch in Boston and married a girl who’d emigrated from Harbour Grace. Grandma died before you were born, but her picture hangs in Grandpa’s bedroom. Sometimes says to it, “Ann, it’s a curse. But how can I break it?”

  You felt terrible about the ice field disaster until you found out that “swiling” means crushing the skulls of baby seals and slicing off their fat and pelts to sell at market. It was for food, Grandpa says. To feed impoverished, starving families at home. In 1972, in response to protests, the United States will ban the import of Canadian seal products and the industry will whither to fifteen thousand kills a year. In 2006, when you settle in Pouch Cove in the house left by your great-aunt, the worldwide demand for fur will cause the Canadian government to increase the annual quota to three hundred and fifty thousand.

 

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