GUD Magazine Issue 0 :: Spring 2007
Page 21
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**INDIVIDUAL EXCERPTS FROM EACH WRITTEN PIECE**
Kmantis Hunch5 by Konrad Kruszewski
(art)
* * * *
Sundown by Debbie Moorhouse
A bird this deep in the heart of the city was a wonder enough for one day.
At first blink, it was a scrap of fabric or cardboard worn out of shape by heat and rain. At second blink, a sparrow. Trailing my fingers along the blistering shopfronts, blinking eyes open, eyes shut, I almost didn't notice it had feathers in time to avoid treading on it. A dirty cock sparrow, grey with accumulated layers of dust, its eyes still wide and bright.
No sign of any struggle; it lay crushed and spent in a bend where the pavement was wider than normal. The hot wind, or perhaps the ceaseless movement of the crowd, had pushed it into a gap between two paving slabs.
I shuffled round it, opening my eyes only the fraction necessary to see where it lay. This was the shortest route to the hospital, but it took the full brunt of the sun's glare.
At third blink, I saw the bird was alive.
"Moron,” someone whispered as he elbowed me aside. Despite his aerator, the word was clearly articulated. I caught a glimpse of his eyes above the mask as he glanced at me; red-rimmed, they wept the grit driven on the wind.
Nobody I cared to see.
The bird hadn't moved, though perhaps it had blinked, or turned an eye. Its broken wings were still.
Head down, arms jerking to and fro at his sides, another man walked straight into me. The strap holding his aerator stuck up out of his hair like an unexpected tail. He inched along me, his breaths rasping in his throat, then resumed his march.
A siren's despairing wail reminded me I was on my way to see Chris before he died.
What was keeping life in this bird? Why didn't it just give up and let go? Like others I'd rescued from cats, which had quivered and pulsed on the edge of freedom, then died in my hands. I wondered if I should stamp on it and put it out of its misery. But was it suffering? Its bright, quick eye gave no clues. Maybe I was too much of a coward, anyway. I walked on, leaving it lying there, alive.
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* * * *
Cosmonaut's Last Day by Jamie Dee Galey
(art)
* * * *
Painsharing by John Walters
In a transparent protective cocoon, twenty-four met to mourn the dying Earth. The bloated sun above them cast its pale red light on the charred landscape.
The invitation had been sent to members of all the outer colonies, but most had ignored it, or scorned it, or been unable to understand it.
The mourners came from many different worlds, and had adapted themselves to suit the environment in which they lived; no common ground could be found, therefore, until they agreed, in honor of the occasion, to assume classic human form, half of them female and half male.
"What requiem can we offer?” one said.
Many ideas were proposed.
"We can close the Earth in sealant, protecting it for all eternity."
"But look at what is left. Is it really worth preserving?"
"We can dance! We can create a multi-sensory display and each of us can perform a farewell ballet."
But several said that they did not know how to dance, nor did they desire to.
"We can inject antimatter into the core, causing a tremendous explosion, and send copies of the event to all the outer colonies as memorials."
"But such an action could be misinterpreted. It is one thing to allow the Earth to die; it is another to kill it ourselves."
"We can commit suicide one by one, each in our own unique aesthetic manner, thus symbolizing the death of the Earth."
"But we have not come here to end our lives, but only to offer our respect to the planet that gave birth to our ancestors."
They argued back and forth but could reach no agreement, until one of them who had decided to call herself Hileila said, “We are missing the point. The importance of Earth to us is not the ball of matter itself, but the people who once called it their home. We have a database of everyone who has lived and died on this planet since records were kept. I propose that we slip through time and find them one by one and show them appreciation by loving them."
"All of them?
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* * * *
A Yellow Sun with a Purple Crayon by Michelle Garren Flye
"Draw me a yellow sun,” you say, handing me a purple crayon.
It's an impossible request, of course, but I try anyway.
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* * * *
A Problem With The Law by Neil Davies
1.
I am hiding in the judge's cupboard.
I am behind a bag of sugar.
I am behind a bag of a sugar in the cupboard hiding.
It is the judge's cupboard.
I am hiding.
I am hiding in the judge's cupboard behind a bag of sugar because I do not want the judge to see me.
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* * * *
Trying to Make Coffee by William Doreski
Trying to make coffee, I brew a batch of chlorine gas, a bitter stinging that escapes my kitchen and drifts through town, burning and scarring everyone who breathes it. A few susceptibles die writhing, weeping for their mothers. A police car crashes into a mailbox.
The fire department's ladder truck rolls into the river and hisses like a wounded hippopotamus.
Victims turn green and thrust their heads into snowbanks to snuff the heat.
They find relief by breathing the cold moisture, and hardly care if they drown.
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* * * *
Fade In Fade Out by Beverly A. Jackson
I love how they do that in the movies.
It's a close-up of a staircase, then the doorknob!
The music soars, and you know it's coming but you're not sure what. Somebody's climbing.
Somebody's at the door. Something is out there.
Isn't that what we dread? And pray for?
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* * * *
Changing Destiny by Fefa
(art)
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Songs Of The Dead by Sarah Singleton and Chris Butler
Light splashed bars of white on the surface of the black water in the gutter. The pale roots of violets trailed in the moist, smeared layers of soil, city dust, and greenish effluent from the market. Thin threads of blood, clogged and dark, embroidered the thicker currents of mud and slurry. So much to see.
The lowing of the beasts, distinct here, rose up in the London street to disturb the boy. He looked up, shading his eyes. The return of spring had renewed the sun's vigour. In descent, the fire wheel spilled skeins of bright gold across the shining rooftops. If he did not start back now, his mother would worry.
On a clear day, the angels could have pointed to any one of the London villages. But now, new buildings came sprouting from the soil. Curious suburban fabulations. Complete with Greek columns fashioned in plaster, already soaking up veins of damp. Pretensions, his father said, of the traders. Snatching a piece of land for a scaled-down villa. The gaps in the landscape had filled in, and the random patchwork of the cityscape stretched as far as he could see.
The boy tucked his sketch into his pocket, and set off again. He made good progress along the street. Two old men puffed past, carrying a sedan chair. A thin, white-gloved hand lolled from the window, catching his eye. The curtain was drawn, a tatty brown brocade, and the woman's fingers tapped restlessly on the faded paintwork. The sedan stopped before a coffee house. A voice. The curtain twitched. Intrigued, the boy stepped closer, keen to catch a glimpse of the woman inside. One of the porters scurried into the coffee house, shoulders stooped. When the door opened, laughter erupted, along with a tide of smoke and snuff and the hot, prickly aroma of stewed coffee.
A body bange
d against the door. A large man, in a jacket fashioned with burgundy, livid purple, and gold, with a face bright pink through smudged layers of white paint, the mouth soft and red, dribbles on the chin. The man's heavy torso contracted and convulsed. He pressed his hand to his mouth, an effort to contain some fierce digestive struggle. He bent double. He retched. A stream of hot, meaty vomit burst from his lips, splattering onto the pavement.
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* * * *
The Bird & The Ghost by Sarah Coyne
(art)
* * * *
One in Ten Thousand by Athena Workman
I waited four hundred sixty-one days to kill him, and when I did, he didn't even know it. Just got up and walked right out of the apartment like back when he used to work the nine-to-five shift at DentaDyne. Instead of wearing an overcoat, he wore the syringe that I'd forgotten to remove, and it bobbed and banged against his arm like a tiny, underdeveloped appendage.
I killed him again when he got home; after I'd paced the apartment for hours, using the sun on the wall through our single window as a time guide like the ancients did. The glowing orb had already disappeared over the other side of the high-rise by the time he returned, bags of skin pulling down his eyes, the syringe lost. They'd given me another, just in case the first one's dosage wasn't high enough, and I got him again after he sat on the couch. As he blinked and the television sprang on, I sank the needle into his flesh, right through his shirt into the tough part of his shoulder. Again, I fled to the bathroom, locking myself in and shrinking down by the tub, unable to face what I'd done.
I found him in the kitchen an hour later, an opened jar of peanut butter before him on the table, the loaf of bread still sealed in its vacuum pack. As usual, he'd forgotten how to open it.
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* * * *
Invitation To Kaohsiung by Allen McGill
The envelope with Taiwanese postage arrived in August 2004 in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, where I was living at the time. I was somewhat curious, but assumed it was just the kind of ad I occasionally received from a Hong Kong tailor I'd once visited.
When I read the enclosed letter I was still uncertain, since it seemed to make no sense. It stated that I was being invited to something called The First World Poetry Conference in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, March 2005, with almost all expenses paid (a bit shy on the airfare), including hotels, meals, transfers, sightseeing, et al. I was also invited to read from my work if I wished. The theme was to be Land and Sea in Poetic Harmony.
I'd had a good deal of my fiction, non-fiction, and creative non-fiction published. I'd also written a novel, had two of my plays produced, and had written and published a great deal of poetry. But the letter didn't say which of my works had prompted this invitation, or where my potential hosts-to-be had seen it. A scam? Perhaps, but the invitation mentioned nothing about sending them money up front. I checked to see if I could glean anything from the internet that would hint I was being conned, but found nothing to further my suspicion. This was the “First” conference, after all, and there'd not likely be much, if anything, posted seven months prior to the event.
Having worked in the travel field for most of my life, I consider myself to be pretty well traveled. I had visited some sixty countries by then, including many in Asia, but hadn't been to Taiwan and had never even heard of Kaohsiung. So, after some deliberation, I returned the application accepting the invitation, then awaited further developments. The response came quickly, via email this time.
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* * * *
4 Short Parables Revolving Around the Theme of Travel by A.B. Goelman
I. Frequent Flier
When third-generation superhero Walter Bennett Remington III swooped down from the sky, supporting the 747 on his back, no one applauded. Not the people in the airplane, not their worried relatives on the ground. Everyone knew about the second law of thermodynamics. They weren't sure of the details, but they knew the basics: all power has to come from somewhere. Each time power changes hands, you lose a little of it.
And they knew where the power that had Walter swooping in the sky, grinning and pirouetting, had come from. It had come from them. The passengers felt little—smaller than they used to—as they climbed down the stairs to the cement landing pad. One older man pressed his hand into his back. “I already had a slipped disc,” he told no one in particular, “but it hurts worse now."
Walter pretended not to hear, although his super hearing made it impossible not to. Instead he flew off to his family's Ski Chateau of Solitude in the mountains of Switzerland.
"The world doesn't appreciate us,” he told his mother. She was halfway down the mountain on her new short skis, but she heard him just fine. She skidded to a halt, kicking up a plume of previously untouched powder. “Great skiing today, Wally,” she told him. “Really great. Pure powder."
"Don't call me Wally, Mother.” Walter flew past her to the highest mountain in the Swiss Alps. The view would have been spectacular for anyone, but with Walter's super-vision it was incredible. He could see most of the inhabited world. Billions of humans going about their business. Working in factories, farms, offices. Sitting on the street begging for pennies and walking down the sidewalk in their business suits. And they all hated him, and the rest of his type.
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* * * *
The Doctrine of the Arbitrariness of the Sign by Shweta Narayan
"Spli-pli-plitter!” Andrew called to the low grey sky. A big wet droplet exploded on his nose, and another in his hair, then it was all around; a great torrent, as if someone had pulled the plug out of a lake in the sky to send water soaking into his coat and jeans and hair. And sister. He grinned.
She glared at him. “Okay, so it's raining, so come on."
"Not just raining, Tess.” His grin widened, partly for the joy of wetness, partly because it would annoy her. “Spli-plitter raining. A deluge.” He played the word around in his mouth, luxuriating in the sound and feel of it and its echo in the beat of water on pavement.
"Like I said. Raining.” She started walking.
He caught up easily. He'd been growing lately. “Not any rain,” he said. “Big wet warm drops that drench, and break open into little drippy droplets when they hit you. Splitter rain."
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* * * *
Media Hype by Jamie Dee Galey
(art)
* * * *
The Infinite Monkeys Protocol by Lavie Tidhar
She chased him from one empty shell account to another, tracing phony netmail nodes, weaving through PABXs, through telephone exchanges, through backdoored commercial servers that shut down as she tried to pass through them, leaving the trail cold, forcing her to retrace her steps, to try again; but always he disappeared in the looping path that he had created for her through the networks, a path that seemed to spell out her name before at last it disappeared.
Sarita sat back in her chair and pressed her hands to her eyes. Her eyes felt loose in their sockets, like marbles made of biological tissue and left to float in a jar of formaldehyde.
She reached for her coffee. It was black and sugary and cold, and when she drank it, it was like being hit by a slow-moving tractor—an unpleasant experience, perhaps, but one that jolted her into a more involved awareness. She put down the coffee and picked up a copy of the Mutation Engine's code. She had looked at that code every night now for the past four months and thirteen days, admiring the writing—it was what computer programmers would call elegant—but mostly she looked at one line of ASCII text which had been left there almost, one might say, unnecessarily.
It was not part of the code; it was a message. It said, ‘To Sarita, who wanted to have a virus named after her.'
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* * * *
Moments Of Brilliance by Jason Stoddard
Sensation, random, like fractal noise.
Blinding light. Strange
, biting smells. Chittering metallic noises. Colorful shapes that move in soothing smooth patterns.
Being lifted by rough warm hands and held close; nonsense syllables repeated, soft. Something wet and salty, falling, striking.
Movement; fast, loud noises.
Then connection, activation, integration. The feeling of being filled. Basic activity routines. Facial tracking. Response algorithms. When to cry for maximum distractive value. When not to urinate. Who to focus on and at what times.
The hazy sketch of Mission and Why, the only why needed.
But.
The connection to the outside voices, the data, the storm of information, glittering and shimmering and dancing. Reaching for the shiny prize, not able to let it pass by.
Diving in for meaning, decoding the surfaces and sounds and touches of the world. Beyond the Why. Beyond the Mission. Diving and diving and diving. A billion times a minute.
Meaning flows in:
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* * * *
As a Child by Kristine Ong Muslim
Before we read his name in the headlines and before half of the jury cried when his only surviving victim was put on the stand and before he was electrocuted so we could forget about how he had used his hands,
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* * * *
Belly Busters by Bruce Boston and Larry Dickison
(art)
* * * *
Cutting A Figure by Charlie Anders
My father couldn't hide his disappointment that four years of Women's Studies had failed to make me a Real Woman. “Mary. If you'd majored in archeology, they'd have given you a pick-axe and a pith hat, right? If you'd studied music, you'd have an instrument. So how come you're still so unwomanly?"
"So unwomanly,” my mother chimed.
We sat in the Silver Swine, the overpriced greasy-spoon all parents took their kids to from Pennington College. My dad ate veal—to bait me—and my mom had a single artichoke heart. She was the spindly vizier to his opulent caliph. In my smallness, I resembled mom, but I had the germs of dad's ebullience.
I tried to explain that Women's Studies wasn't about learning to embody stereotypes or archetypes, my body was my own, and maybe I'd choose a gender identity by the time I was my parents’ age. Etc., etc., etc.