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William Steele, the Seismology Lab Coordinator at the University of Washington Geophysics Program, has a son, Chris, who goes to elementary school. “He comes in sometimes and he loves to do stuff.” It seems he’d recently put a sticker on one of the lab’s monitors, and his father had some trouble accessing the equipment. “What an excuse!” Steele never did get into the program he’d wanted to show me.
December 4th of last year there was a magnitude 5.1 quake in Klamath Falls, Oregon. Aftershocks were felt in Washington State. I had headed out to the UW in search of information on recent earthquake activity in the Puget Sound region.
“Oregon is relatively quiet next to Washington. But this year, we’ve had an enormous amount of activity in Oregon, counter to past patterns.” Klamath Falls couldn’t be noisier, said Steele, ticking off the numbers: September 4th, 5.9; Sept. 20th, 5.9, 5.0, 4.3; Dec. 4th, 5.1; and Christmas Day, 4.0, 3.4.
Most of our local activity in the Puget Sound region is recorded by the UW’s lab equipment. They have an emergency preparation computer program called “Beat the Quake,” hailing from the land of quakes, California, which has suffered through quite a lot of severe earthquake damage lately. That’s the program Steele had trouble running on his computer. Fortunately, the UW’s Seismology Lab has far more emergency preparedness information “so we don’t have to begin from ground zero” in the likely event of an earthquake. Steele is also the Public Information Officer covering quakes through the UW. “We have 135 seismic stations throughout Washington and Oregon, currently operating, and we’re expanding. We really cover a tremendously broad area.”
They locate quakes precisely, then determine the magnitude (quantity of total energy released by the quake), location (area affected by the quake), and epicenter (location on the surface directly above the focus, or place where an earthquake originates.)
They collect data about the geology of the region as well. “It’s critical data. This lab is an educational center for graduate students in geophysics.” They also educate citizens. School groups bring in students, and Steele speaks at civic organizations, encouraging people to take action and make themselves safer from earthquakes.
Of course, the big question everyone asks is, “When?”
“We’re not able to put down a date. It’s more complicated because three types of quakes occur in the Puget Sound region. The most common are deep earthquakes.
“Signals travel through the planet’s crust, sometimes all the way from the other side.” Events from anywhere show up on their helicorder sheets, making an analog, a 24-hour record, of every quake. For example, the Klamath Falls quakes, which are very near California on the Oregon coast.
“We cover the Cascade Range, and have multiple stations on every volcano. We have a good station at Mt. Baker, adequate to cover the region.” Earthquakes around volcanoes are very common.
The lab shares data with California for quakes occurring on the border of California and Oregon. “We’re part of the Washington Regional Seismic Network.” Steele showed me a map of Pacific Northwest Seismicity, 1969-1991. There were huge blue clusters in Puget Sound. What are those, I asked. “Moderate, shallow, and deep quakes. The deep clusters are in the Puget Basin.”
Deep earthquakes, the ones you really tend to write home about, are the largest in magnitude as measured on the Modified Mercalli Intensity Scale. The values usually range from 1.0 (not felt) to 7.0 (extreme damage to buildings and land surfaces). They can go even higher, as they have in recent deep quakes in Alaska.
Here’s what’s happening in Puget Sound: about 300 kilometers or more out from the coast is where the deep quakes are generated. There’s a ridge 500 to 700 kilometers out called the Juan de Fuca Ridge, and new material, new sea floor, is being deposited all the time along it. It pushes the Juan de Fuca plate toward the North American plate underneath the Seattle area. The Juan de Fuca plate moves an average of two inches a year, towards us, lifting the other plate.
A border zone locks it up, an interface between the two plates that stops the oceanic plate, making it subduct beneath us, forcing the ocean plate down into the mantle of the Earth. This boundary is called the Cascadia Subduction Zone, and extends from the middle of Vancouver Island in British Columbia down to Northern California.
The Earth’s mantle lies beneath its brittle crust. It’s semi-solid, due to tremendous heat and pressure. “Our Cascade volcanoes are probably there because of plate subduction beneath us. The push deforms the crust and builds up tremendous stresses. Right now, the coast of Washington is rising. It’s bulging up.” The oceanic plate is “cold rock” and the shock of the two forces meeting leads to deep earthquakes. Washington has recently experienced two large ones, in 1949 and 1965.
A flyer from the lab states that roughly 1,000 earthquakes per year are recorded in Washington and Oregon. “Between one and two dozen of these cause enough ground shaking to be felt by residents. Most are in the Puget Sound region, and few cause any real damage. However, based on the history of past damaging earthquakes and our understanding of the geologic history of the Pacific Northwest, we are certain that damaging earthquakes (magnitude 6.0 or greater) will recur in our area, although we have no way to predict whether this is more likely to be today, or years from now.” Steele thinks it will be soon.
“In 1949, there was a severe earthquake in Olympia, 7.1. Eight people were killed and there was millions of dollars worth of property damage. The quake was located 70 kilometers deep.
“In 1965, there was a magnitude 6.5 quake between Seattle and Tacoma.” Both earthquakes were felt as far away as Montana. But there were no aftershocks, as is usual during a deep quake. The infamous aftershocks, known to catch people in the middle of recovering from a bad earthquake, happen during land-based shallow earthquakes. The ocean-based shocks occurred once, causing ground tremors that lasted several minutes. “The 1965 quake killed about five people, and again there was millions of dollars of property damage.” Other deep events, difficult to calculate from records of the times, occurred in 1882, 1909, and 1939. “Every 35 years or so a 6.0+ magnitude quake occurs beneath Puget Basin. The whole region along the coast will shift at once. When it finally builds up enough pressure to kick up, it’ll be a big one.”
Eighty percent of the quakes on the planet happen along the Pacific North West Rim, which is referred to as “The Ring of Fire” because of all our volcanic activity. In 1964, one year before this area’s last big event, south-central Alaska generated a monster 9.3 quake, shaking the ground for twenty minutes, generating tidal waves that decimated Seward’s coast, affected 34,000 square miles, and killed 143 people. And there’s been recent large quakes in Cape Mendecino, California, and Parkfield, California, infamous for ground shaking, in 1992.
Brian Atwater of the USGS (United States Geological Service) and the UW geology department has done studies along the coasts of Washington and Oregon. He’s found a kind of layered soil…”what he found…ghost forests killed by the last big quakes. Subduction zone material covered by coarse black sand.” A layer gradually turned into forest floor and then the sand layer. “As bulging continues, coastline rises, and low-lying areas are flushed clean by salt water. Stress released during the quake makes the coastline subside by seven or eight feet. It ‘drops.’ If you’re living at five feet above sea level, it’s not a very comfortable thing.”
Earthquakes also generate large tsunamis, or tidal waves; the biggest ones, generated by larger quakes, can rip up an entire coastline for miles, wiping out bridges, roads, and buildings. The really great subduction zone quakes, 9.0 or more, only occur about once a century on the face of the planet. Strangely, a big quake may result in only about three-and-a-half minutes worth of strong ground shaking, which doesn’t sound like much. “One recent California quake was only seventeen seconds of strong ground motion, a 7.1 quake. A 7.0 quake releases the equivalent of 199,000 tons of TNT in energy; a 9.0 releases 200 million tons, or 17,000 atomic bombs’
worth of force.
“The difference between an 8 and a 9 is greater than the difference between a 2 and an 8, because of the logarithmic scale. The force increases exponentially. It gets 30 times greater each time.” I wondered if it ever goes up to 10.0.
By carbon-14 dating organic matter in ground and sea levels, “scientists can determine approximate dates for events going back 10,000 years.” Finding clues about these earthquakes involves both painstaking research and educated guesswork.
Research has recently identified a Seattle fault which generated a large quake between 1,000 to 1,100 years ago. “There were landslides, and a huge seiche-when something big falls in the water, creating waves like tsunamis. Large block landslides occurred in forests. Restoration Point on Bainbridge Island rose twenty feet from Puget Sound in seconds during that event.”
Buildup from glacial ice sheets once covering the continent make it difficult to analyze shallow crust faults. But geologists are pretty sure there are two major Seattle faults. The biggest one runs from the north tip of Mercer Island through Eastgate to the Kingdome, just north of West Seattle. The other fault runs through White Center, parallel to the bigger one. In 1872, an estimated 7.3 shallow quake caused what seismologists call “felt reports” from observers, the only evidence of some older quakes. Native Americans tell legends about what must have been some very sizeable earthquakes and tsunamis.
Nowadays, all the real-time telemetry (automatic transmission of data from a distant source to a receiving station) comes through in the back of the lab, where Steele poured me a cup of Starbucks coffee at their metal sink in a very equipment-crowded space. “Relays ‘zap’ activity energy in nanoseconds to the lab. Before people in a region know what’s going to hit them, we do.” The helicorders monitor 23 stations on analog. “We focus on volcanoes. All stations, including the ones on helicorders, go onto the computer system in the next room. The discriminator in the back takes FM carrier signals and separates them from seismic signals, leaving an amplified seismic signal. It goes to the front room, changing into digital information the computer can read.
“If it picks up a ‘jump’ (a skip in the needle on the helicorder) on a station, it checks other stations and records all data, whether there’s a signal or not. If it’s a big quake, it does estimates of the magnitude etc. via programs, beeps the people (like Steele), and sends information to seismologists around the region.” Steele might hear a “beep” anytime.
As I drank my coffee, Steele told me he’s a grad student, his life’s partner works, and together they support their family, renting a house in Wallingford and raising two kids. “It’s a rewarding job, but…the rewards are not monetary.” Nonetheless, he feels treated as a colleague by everyone, and has a good working relationship with all his “fellows at the lab.”
About earthquake preparedness, Steele is adamant. “The secret is not fear and loathing in Seattle, and that we have to hide under our beds. Let’s get ready. Our schools need to get to the point where we can withstand a 7.4 earthquake. How many little bodies do we need under bricks before we start spending some money?” Right now, there are no definite laws enforcing earthquake building codes, “if the building code years ago said you could pile bricks without mortar on top of each other.”
Unreinforced masonry creates structures that fall during even moderate earthquakes. “The entire wall of a school can fall down and kill students. A brick that falls three stories doesn’t slow down,” he said, referring to the death of a boy during the 1965 earthquake. Steele is certain such deaths are preventable.
At least six schools in Oregon have unreinforced structures, bricks that can fall and fill a doorway, blocking the exit. “Retrofit them, or tear them down and build another school. If a school has been considered unsafe for a quake lately, they can sell it, and it becomes a senior center. No laws stop that. These buildings need to be brought up to code or taken down. Deaths will happen unless we act. India just had a 6.8 quake…tens of thousands dead. There needs to be water and food stored away to last 72 hours. You need to get under a table and ride it out; get down on the ground, under something; check to see if you smell gas, and turn it off; electricity, too.”
You should get to know your community resources, Steele said. And in case of severe aftershocks, if you’re in a building “you should wait until the shaking stops, and then get out.” Lots of people are killed by falling debris while evacuating buildings.
The number of FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency) in Woodinville, headed by Chris Trisler, is (206) 487-4645. It’s their job to assist people with earthquake preparedness.
What does Steele see in the immediate future? “I expect more of the same. Probably some quakes greater than 4.0 in the Puget Sound area. While we’ve been talking, there’ve been events in Klamath Falls,.” As I write this, there are aftershocks east of the Dec. 4 “sequence” starting in Klamath Falls. “The question is, are we going to recognize the danger and do something about it, or are we going to wait until we have an adequate death toll? I’d like to see a dedicated plan and some leadership from the state. It’ll be a lot of money.”
Steele said a colleague of his said it best: “The next great disaster will happen as soon as we forget about the last one.”
Some of the information in this article is from “Washington State Earthquake Hazards,” by Lawrance, Qamar, and Thorsen, 1988.)
WHAT TO DO OTHER THAN SCREAM YOUR LUNGS OUT – FALL DOWN!
Apparently, you may hear a very loud, building sound before the frenzy begins. The below is from “How to Survive in Earthquake Country,” a FEMA pamphlet. Find out about your risks, at home, and in your workplace. Get more specifics from the American Red Cross, or FEMA.
Learn what causes injuries: parts falling off building exteriors and interiors; flying pieces of broken glass; overturning bookcases; unanchored water heaters; storage facilities; anything made of glass; fires from damaged gas lines; electric lines; wood stoves; chimneys; toxic fumes.
Create emergency preparedness plans: find safe spots in your home; identify escape routes; plan two ways out of each room; pick two places to meet, outside your house and outside the neighborhood if you can’t return home; show everyone how to shut off water, gas and electricity; practice your plans, now.
Read “Your Family Disaster Plan,” and “Emergency Preparedness Checklist,” which you can get from FEMA.
Reduce earthquake hazards: evaluate your home; strap water heaters and gas appliances down; remember, stiff items snap; place heavy objects on lower shelves; anchor everything heavy; anchor hanging objects; support community earthquake preparedness.
Businesses, schools, daycares, neighborhoods, churches, clubs: hold workshops. Assemble a disaster preparedness kit: store food, water, clothes, a first aid kit, a radio, flashlights, and batteries, good for 72 hours of use, in your car trunk, home, and office. For more details, consult the FEMA brochure, “Your Family Disaster Supplies Kit.”
During/after an earthquake: stay calm; don’t panic or run. Earthquakes are usually preceded by loud sounds, so take quick action. You actually have about two seconds, so get ready for that earthquake now to protect yourself and others. Stay where you are: drop, cover and hold something solid, or take immediate cover under a heavy desk or table, in a doorway, hallway, or against inside walls. Turn away from glass. Keep away from chimneys, windows, tall bookcases, and objects that might fall.
Evacuate only after the shaking stops. Use the stairs, not the elevator. Remember, aftershocks may occur at any time. Listen to a radio or TV for instructions. Outdoors: move away from buildings, trees, and utility wires. Sit on the ground until the shaking stops. Flee inland immediately when near a coastline. Check for injuries. Do not move seriously injured people unless they’re in danger. Indoors: evacuate damaged buildings, as aftershocks could cause additional damage, or buildings can collapse.
Do not re-enter a building until it’s declared safe by responsible authorities. Don’t use the
telephone except for emergencies; stay off the phone. Check for fires. Have a fire extinguisher, and know how to use it. Check utilities: gas, electric, and water lines may be broken. Gas: do not use matches, candles, open flames or electric switches indoors, because of possible gas leaks. If you smell gas, open windows, leave, and shut off the main gas valve, which is usually outside.
Electricity: if wiring is broken, shut off electricity at the main switch. Don’t touch anything near downed or damaged lines. Water: if water pipes are broken, shut off the supply at the main valve outside. Use water from ice cubes, water heaters, toilet tanks (if they don’t contain chemical cleaners). Clean up spills. Attend carefully to spills of potentially harmful materials such as medicines, drugs, and household cleaners. Provide adequate ventilation, as chemicals may combine to produce toxic gas. Remember to assist others in need.
And also remember: it’s not your fault. (Sorry about that, I couldn’t resist the joke.)
THE END
Executive Director of Ghost Writer, Inc., Karen S. Cole writes. GWI at www.rainbowriting.com is a renowned affordable online professional copy writers, book authors, ghost writers, copy editors, proof readers, coauthors, rewriters, book cover creation, graphics and CAD, digital and other photography, publishing assistance and book and screenplay writers, editors, developers and paid analysts service. We also do presentation and pitch services for your book and/or screenplay ideas to major TV and film industry representatives.
Last of a Dying Breed
By Karen S. Cole
Word Count: 800
In the funnies, we read about Lois “Nellie Bly” Lane, Jimmy “Huckleberry Finn” Olson, and Clark “James Thurber” Kent, three Journalists. In the Puget Sound Region, we knew of a Newsboy Legion of the paper boxes – who almost managed a “good ol’ time” there…amidst the Local Unions. While newsboys hawked papers, a section of Town grew up . . . this story was originally published in “Seattle Downtown News,” a local prestigious Seattle downtown paper for business people of the region. It was the top headline on the First Page, an honor I was quite happy to receive.
LACING DOWNTOWN SEATTLE are half a dozen old-time newsstands, the kind that tend to be made of wood and painted green or brown, with a simple roof for shelter in a downpour, and a hard-edged lean-to look. Spare and Spartan, such booths have existed here since at least 1919. But the news hawkers are in deep danger of disappearing forever…potentially overnight.
Just as he closed for the day I met with one of the men in the downtown newsstands, peak-chinned and hawklike, green-eyed, small, lithe and sharp as a news hawker should be.
We sipped two dollars’ worth of coffee at the Turf near First in the Market’s part of downtown as he told me about his particular newsstand at Third and Union in front of the old Woolworth’s building.
“My name is Pat Hickey. I’ve been here since August of 1975.” Twenty-eight years hawking papers from inside an old run-down newsstand. “I manage the stand. My boss is Dennis Hogan.
“It was put up in 1919. The legendary Frank Turco opened up the stand. He ran it until his death in 1966. There have been 85 years of continuous service on this corner.
“Some of our customers are wealthy men who own horses and depend on us to sell their racing forms. We make most of our money selling the racing forms.
“When they built the bus tunnel and narrowed Third Avenue, we lost most of our car trade and never got it back.”
Times and PI sales have fallen off pretty badly over the years on account of so many vending racks on all the downtown corners.
“You see, people don’t depend on newspapers anymore, because they get their news off the television. The truth of the matter is that the downtown newsstand, for decades a fixture in all the major American cities, is going the way of the dinosaur.”
I interrupted Hickey with “I caught you just in time!”
“Well, sort of. Due to the fifteen cents profit per paper. It goes to the dealer or the owner of the vending rack. Ten cents is the wholesale price. We buy it for ten cents and we sell it for twenty-five, hence the fifteen cent profit.”
To clear fifteen dollars one would have to sell 100 papers.
“In the old days selling that many papers was nothing. Now to sell 100, one would have to have hot headlines or a great day.”
Frank Turco, Hickey told me, was middle-aged when he founded the first downtown newsstands.
“He came out from Pittsburgh, PA and he lost a leg in a train accident in Montana. He was quite an industrial entrepreneur. In not too many years, he had newsstands over a good portion of downtown Seattle.”
For a long time, he was one of downtown’s most recognizable faces; people in the thousands knew him by sight. In the 1940’s he ran for city council as a reform candidate.
“A reform candidate is one who’s going to, you know, radically reform the whole system. Politics in the 40s were very corrupt,” Hickey stated significantly. “Frank Turco was very involved in union politics. He was the head of Seattle’s newsboy union.
“It was sort of a closet union…it was set up for the benefit of the union to make money off the newsboys who made peanuts for money. Turco was a newsboy and believed in justice for the working man. You gotta handle that with a little more skill. He was exploiting the newsboys.”
Too soon, Hickey had to go back to his beloved newsstand. “The idea is, you’re in a dinosaur, and you may be catching the tail end of something that really has a very long history.”
Downtown newsstands are almost as old as the cities. Over the years there have been hundreds of colorful newspaper vendors, such as PI Mary, an eccentric old lady who sold papers down on First. She went back to the Second World War. She would boldly go right into the First Avenue bars, and directly sell papers to the customers.
“We’ve definitely been a part of the fabric of downtown life. Unfortunately, most of the newsboys have been pushing up roses for a long, long time,” Hickey sighed.
When I left the newsstand, an unknown gambler in the booth, whispering to Hickey, “I.M. Anonymous” by name, closed its green doors at me as a definitive sign-off.
THE END
Executive Director of Ghost Writer, Inc., Karen S. Cole writes. GWI at www.rainbowriting.com is a renowned affordable online professional copy writers, book authors, ghost writers, copy editors, proof readers, coauthors, rewriters, book cover creation, graphics and CAD, digital and other photography, publishing assistance and book and screenplay writers, editors, developers and paid analysts service. We also do presentation and pitch services for your book and/or screenplay ideas to major TV and film industry representatives.
Bubbleator 2044
Set in Seattle Science Fiction – Tongue in Cheek & Liberal Left!
By Karen S. Cole
Word Count: 2,300
“We are like animalcule in a drop of water…” Fredric Brown
AN UNDERGROUND “BUBBLEATOR” TRANSIT SYSTEM operated for 34 years through President, Calaveras, and Snohomish Counties in Western Washington without suffering through one solitary mishap. The Regional Transit Authority’s “Vision 2010” plans were now well-realized, and you could go almost anywhere via underground transit – if you weren’t too claustrophobic.
Sat 4 JUL, 2044, President County’s Chief Exec Cho-M’Bobea lasercut the SoulGold(k) across Pioneer Square Main Station’s (and Sealth’s) newest public toy. The former King County had been renamed President County when Pres. Norm Rice, our second Black President, died in the Virus Riots of 2019. This was done along with renaming the City of Seattle to the “apropos” Native American name of Sealth, for Chief Sealth of the Suquamish and Duwamish tribes, who made peace with local snotty white people of 1856 A.D.
Construction on each colorful rainbow-painted Bubbleator or “shoebox car” in the brand-spanking new underground transit elevator system had commenced in December 2010, not being completed until March 2045. But by the time this story was told over the Net, TV, video, cells a
nd all other handhelds, people were able to access most sections of this splendid aboveground and underground transit system. It was developed to be absolutely accessible to physically, mentally and spiritually challenged bods – no mercy for the able-bodied!
Literally 1000s of “shoeboxes” dotted the landscape of “Pretzel” County, 1342 in the City of Sealth alone. The 80 Underground Access Elevators of Pioneer Square propelled 20,000+ people an hour through SEAPAC’s three levels of transit, linking the rail systems, van transit, the flyways and the new underwater marine channels to cities all over Western Washington and downcoast into Oregon, California(k), and far, very far, down into Mexico.
CE M’Bobea, a naturalized human Pan-African, spraypainted her name with harmless vegetable dyes outside Main Station’s shoebox, or UAE, on the ever-changing Rainbow Motion Board. ComPugenta(k) cool air, sights, sounds, smells and textures emanated from the board, overpowering a crowd of metallically dressed men, women, kids and natuchildren(k) gathered to watch as members of SEAPAC’s Planning Committee prepared to ride the giant “Levitator.”
“You wouldn’t believe our track improvements,” murmured Zien Pea, a grown natuchild of ten and comember of 2044’s SPC, to a Globavid reporter from East Kenya, then a white-held territory.
The reporter, David Hopdotter, an Anti-Sectionist Jew, was a known crusader on behalf of multi-nationalist groups, and a Western Bloc government-paid news agent. He was nearly keeling over from ComPugenta’s Virtual Reality show, while most of the crowd could barely converse, even in TAP.
“Isn’t work boring you?” David mouthed back. He OMG hated TAP.
But Zien, eyes large and blue-green-golden, TAPPED slowly, in a way sure to enforce her ideas SOUNDLY into David’s mind, that she LOVED the shiny clothes generated for comembers by Seabell/the Coastal Transit Project.
“I HATE autoleather. It’s SQUISHY, growing viraclothes in labs. They mined TONS of Snohomish County gold building the tracks!” She pulled his sleeve, signaling “NO WAY.” Always TAPPING the latest permafrozen slang, Zien.
You TAP using the other’s whole body. That lets in the Deaf-Blind. Zien could see and hear, some, but used a Chair. Suddenly, the entire crowd surged forward when the huge Main Elevator doors opened, letting everyone into the biggest shoebox in town. Zien and 50 other Chairpeds backed in. Padded grabbars merged as the thirty-foot wide doors whispered shut on the hunplus-foot deep shoebox. An unseen natuvoice came on, explicating the UAEs.
“Built to accommodate Sealth’s six-and-a-half million people, not to mention the two million traveling through, the shoeboxes also help generate energy, pumping out excess water from First Level. A circulating hydraulic system drives the new, totally safe, pollution-free Levitator…” droned their invisible female robot, as the leviathan elevator swooped around in loopdyloop passages.
“We’re going through the pretzel now,” David gently TAPPED on Zien’s right shoulder, “If my stomach survives all the twisting.”
Sure enough, the UAE inserted into the Water Table, the very first Underground restaurant in Sealth, just waylay enough to switch corridors while inundating all 328 passengers with gentle virtual reality tastes and aromas, one meal with drink at a time on “menu display.” Only Tokyo’s sub-cafes surpassed its quality.
The giant elevator then merrily zoomed along sideways, its foot-thick Plass front allowing full display of 1000s of tiny restaurants/drug bar fronts, markets and businesses, the six-mile Mall River Forest Park, the PoliBuilding, and Sealth Aquarium’s Salmon (Coho, Chum and Steelhead) Causeway on Mezzanine Level. David loved the salmon causeway, mouthing and TAPPING at Zien constantly about fishing privileges and waiting lists.
“Next month, honey, when I drop in from Qakar (Kenya’s new Pan-African name) I’m gonna take you fishing, up-up-up, I promise!”
Zien didn’t care. David’s third daughter, via fertilization of two women and much frantic labwork to fuse her halved body parts—David had been overtested for IDC (k) (Immune Deficiency Condition) during the Virus Riots of 2025—had a mission. Her single-minded purpose was to promote awareness of genetically altered people as legitimate human beings, in spite of their strange looks, multiple disabilities and scary but exciting potentialities.
Other than that, she ECSTATICALLY loved organic beancream!
But she was more worried than excited about her entry into Underground Sealth’s “Hell Realm,” her Chinese cultural aspects appalled by the cosmopolitan closing-in metallic walls surrounding her, plus the lack of a beautiful blue sky overhead. She knew no colors, but loved blue, able to discern its vibratory patterns the best out of the entire refractive spectrum. She leaned against her IDC-treated father, a man who’d grown up in hospitals, screaming his lungs out to leave.
Care providers of the 21rst Century were a grand delusion of medical skills and elemental soul-casting, taking life quickly with huge doses of poison when it became unpalatable, steadily experimenting with people’s bodies.
“They force us to be made sick and well,” according to megacare reformer Flo Ware X-806 .
Very few comembers were worried about this, Zien found, as she TAPPED on them; SPC Shirley Fung believed medcare to be an attempt “to help, not harm.” Bored with phrases, Zien wanted full citizen’s rights. She was already mayor of her aboveground urban village.
Zien’s burg led SeaTac region’s disposal of wastes into utilizable natural and methane gas pockets. Meanwhile plants, Earth’s chief oxygen source, had cornered AMCA’s inarable land, as everyone wildly sought solutions to the Global Warming problem…something better than air conditioning.
Disabilities, racial/sexual issues and animal rights remained as distantly soluble problems for AMCANS after the World Bank released Engas, the special bonds freezing funds of all countries in Interchange, the major global work of the tens, twenties and thirties. But money as a concept was finally destroyed by computer exchange systems. They couldn’t keep track of theft!
Only human, natu, and animal efforts, computer signals and group co-op signatures were needed to start projects anymore. That meant a multilevel Washington connected by rail to upper Canada, the southmost Baja tip, and all points east by 2039. Rail would have been global if not for planecars. Licensed drivers still flood the buzzing skies over most urban centers. They whiz around each other at lightning speeds.
Ten minutes after taking 43 planned angle turns, the west coast’s tenth largest UAE phwoomphed to a gentle, caressing stop at the Third Level’s biggest platform, Denny RetroParque.
Right under the Upper Queen Anne Transit Island, the parquet was delineated by universal animal and plant symbology. This inculpated regional Sealth landmark symbology, such as ancient Ojibwa totem poles. Aboveground, Metro TransVans provided all short trips within President and Calaveras Counties.
Everyone disembarked, some onto moving platforms, others onto the tree-lined walk/bikeway below. Zien chose the walkway, subfluorescence pulsing robin’s egg blue from the rounded walls. Third Level’s ceiling was an incredible 550-feet high, solar subfluorescence pulsing robin’s egg blue from the rounded walls. Light-emitting diodes wrapped each comember in a unique, 500-tone rainbow that caressed one’s body with orgasmically liquid warmth.
Much is being done at present to help prenatu eyes that reflex poorly against indoor light, disabling children from normal sight. Nowadays natus have all the worst vision problems as keratotomy surgery, widespread since the late ‘10s, has corrected all human vision problems. Some AMCA laws bar natus from the upper levels of the AMCA Armed Services, government and the private sector.
The Jewish father and daughter team deboarded with a knot of 20 comembers, shimmering to the tune of rainbow lights and foggy background attracter music wheezing from sardine-packed restaurants/drug bars, arriving at the commemoratively named Belated Health Bar. The recessed front of the eight-foot wide, 60-foot deep, hunplus-level, hydraulic transfloor Bar stood on the Chairped-access leftpad hologramming Sealth’s famed ruddy terrace
-cotta.
David bought them one of the only family of drugs proven to benefit the human central nervous system by encouraging regrowth of damaged myelin tissue. They sipped twin cool sprinkice freshments with whipped cranboysenberry syrup, and felt the soothing effects of…PPOOOPPPPPPPP!!!
Both of them looked up as all light around Third Level boomed off. The last thing David saw was the glimmer of a pretty remate human’s…or was she natu?…silvamesh, pinfeather-striped organo-metallic dress.
A human-sounding voice vibrated their table as Zien clung to David, TAPPING frantically; the voice echoed like the usual David, TAPPING frantically; the voice echoed like the usual public address PoliSystem Regional Transit operative. But David sensed something amiss. Transit usually hired natus as Vocals.
“Do NOT panic. Your transit system and the Underground parquet are SAFE while service repairs are made. You will experience TEMP darkness…”
Troping the story to Globavid as he carefully listened, David also touched his cellwave phone, capable of wave rescinding through fifty thousand miles of concrete, and called Field Supervisor Terno Farquhar-el-Grey. A Pan-Arab infused with Korean body parts, Farquhar was an old friend of David’s from the Virus Riots. “Far” accidentally took a viral explosion that saved David’s life by swerving his Boeing Eagle convertible, a flying car, into an oncoming blast of fuel, aimed at David, a war analyst for the Redmond Massacre.
“FARQUHAR! My daughter is up a tree! She’s practically climbing into my outer pockets. Why’s it taking forever on this?”
“Tell your daughter to calm down, and press the receiver of your ear. Stat? Good. Third Level is being held by pro-Kenyan terrorists.”
David stoked the word “safe” into Zien’s silver hair. Zien never believed anything but her own Formachair’s computer-laden Envir(k) was safe. But she kinda liked danger. Her chair did not have normal legs. It was not a Spider Chair. It hovered over the ground on a cushion of air, and the legs were receded into the frame.
“Oh, Garamond Adonai, yer HOLLOW!” David laughed at his cute girl. “Farquhar, what is your central life’s difficulty, LOL, anyway?”
“We have about an hour to track down a team of White Party Nairobis before they blow up Third Level with a SUBGUM of a thermo-nuclear explosion, imploding SEALTH. Y’COPY???”
“‘NAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH.” Zien could tell something was wrong. Everyone else was pulling out pocket lights and marijuana (filtered) lightups, creating a flickering candlelit glow. She finally grabbed David’s pocket lighter and beamed his face.
“If you don’t tell,” she TAPPED, all over his body, turning on her background noise inhibitor so she could hear him, “I’LL TICKLE YOU!” That was Zien’s most dreaded trick.
Farquhar steadily intoned David’s doom into one red-veined ear, giving him details the Metro PoliSafety Teams had uncovered through multicam TV detection systems. They’d spotted two alien men clothed head-to-toe in light-absorbing black Starcloth(k) when one of them idiotically lit an unfiltered hash joint.
“We turned on each sprinkler system to dampen their clothes so we can ranar ‘em better. Plus, now there will be no more fire-setting. The Purple Team saw them in Zone 14. Definitely the body shapes of human pro-phobics.”
Phobics were what media called “white” people scared of racially merging with brown people. Worldwide. There were plenty of these, holding assets of resources in centers of power, since the Virus Riots; and the Darwin-based pleas for supremacy from the former rich wielders of money and securities. David, a former phobic, hated it passionately since natu Zien was born.
Zien’s mothers were the only match possible out of available candidates for BirthQuest(k) from David’s tired, medic-tampered body. By the time he pushed to have kids he had to face that. Two Szechwan women selflessly tolerant of his Life Profile were needed to combine every sustainable, undamaged chromosome.
“The City is the place where the diffused rays of many separate Beans of Life fall into focus…” spoke a Chinese proverb in 1994 on the wall of a Metro office. “Far, how in HELL do a Jew and a disabled natu enter Zone 14, alone and unaided, when we’re all the way – Zien, gimme light – INTO ZONE 36 UQATI?”
“You don’t, we do. We’re in Zones 12 to 16, searching, and we’ve got ‘em surrounded. There go the batteries,” Farquhar sighed as hundreds of backup superconductors flooded on. “They have a combined life of about a million years. Since the world lost money as a concept we can use either system anymore. But I guess we’ll pull easy handle on Third Level’s generator soon…
“…Yup. McCaulough says they submicrowaved terminals in the fused Permaplates(k). One of the Green Team must be THEM. Oops. There’s only…all twelve of them just surrendered…their liaison says Nairobi used to be allies with my old country! We have the thermo-nuclear BOMBO – enda problema!”
Farquhar’s words, assimilating in David’s recording cells, pared down to an essential story. David troped film/voice to Globavid pretty much like sneezing. Smiling at his relieved daughter and their refreshing liquid drugs, he touched his cell off by gently stroking it with his left little finger.
THE END
Executive Director of Ghost Writer, Inc., Karen S. Cole writes. GWI at www.rainbowriting.com is a renowned affordable online professional copy writers, book authors, ghost writers, copy editors, proof readers, coauthors, rewriters, book cover creation, graphics and CAD, digital and other photography, publishing assistance and book and screenplay writers, editors, developers and paid analysts service. We also do presentation | pitch services for your book and screenplay ideas to major TV and film industry representatives.
Happiness is a Head Cold
Short Version of how I got hitched!
By Karen S. Cole
Word count: 750
How could marriage result from a head cold? Why, I squirm as if caught in a velvet trap…well, I could, but my husband is standing behind me and might ask me what I’m sitting on. Yes, it’s been nothing but high misadventure for me, especially since I lost my brave and sincere first husband, a wonderful Austrian-American Jew, to combined MS and cancer in 1985.
Anyway, several years and as many nerve-wracking, tumultuous, and sanity-defying relationships later, I landed in the plastic schoolroom seat in front of Remerio, my future second husband, in a five-week Certified Nurse Aide class held at a nursing home near Northgate in Seattle, next to a merrily perking and brewing coffee pot. Innocent and unknowing, I was headed for yet another high-pitched roller coaster ride.
Grace was sitting to the right front, I was seated to the rear left, and I was mildly jealous of her degree of nursing home experience. I was fitfully “taking it out” on Grace. I was casting her sidelong glances, and sniffling loudly and intermittently. It was quite embarrassing. So I started guiltily fetching her a hot cup of coffee sometimes, as the pot was brewing closer to me than her. It would’ve been hard for Grace to squeeze between the seats and fetch herself a hot, fresh cup without spilling it. I began getting her some coffee.
But our commiserative relationship as two ladies of eldercare was rudely interrupted by the rapid-fire entrance of Remerio’s sneakered foot through the reverberating back of my nearly shattering cheap plastic chair. Turning around, right after the “kick-off,” I faced down a middle-aged, flatly Hispanic cold stare. His face reminded me of a similar nut-brown countenance, a Middle-Eastern teacher I’d been attracted to ‘way back at Ohio University. Said chap always mispronounced the word “equilibrium” in a characteristic accent that could shatter a glass retort. He explained the rules of physical science to us neophyte med students in as high of a pitch as he could muster, but it was musical and alluring somehow…and this kicky guy behind me looked a lot like him.
Remerio turned out to be a multi-talented Philippine/Hawaiian import, a seventh-degree black belt, a fabulous chef of his regional cuisines and one heck of a lip-locking rugged kisser, in approximately that order. I was an artist and writer of l
ong standing who needed some work “on the side,” so I’d decided to take a Certified Nurse Aide training course and move in with a little old lady I knew who needed the help. It was a great way to continue my career without interference. But now this new guy had shown up in my life. I tried out assuming there was something nice about him. He gradually began merrily chasing me to the bus stop in his beat-up old blue and white pickup truck. He soon followed me home, and Mommy said I could keep him.
Actually, “Mommy” was Carrie, a disabled little old lady freckly dwarf I was working for and living with at the time. She needed in-home care, and Remerio helped us move into a larger apartment, cooking and cleaning for us. I scarcely had to lift a finger; he was simply everywhere, driving us to church and generally relieving me of my cares and woes until Carrie abruptly died, peacefully in her sleep.
We married a week after Cinquo de Mayo. On Christmas Day three years later we were blessed by our little princess Angela, nut-brown as her Daddy and sporting my chipmunk cheekbones. This incident may be the only time in history that a cold-stricken gal every attracted a lonely, jealously protective guy through being an apparently obvious, blatant and coffee-fetching sniffling sicko.
I guess I’d suggest that more single ladies, and any other intrigued parties, try sniffling at people sitting nearby to see whose attention they get. You may attract a wonderful soul, which might work out quite well, especially if they happen to be an excellent cook — as the husband of a friend of mine (who used this method) turned out to be. Hope that he or she has a weird sense of humor.
If so, it helps a lot if you fetch them some coffee. It soothes their tired, ruffled feathers. Seems some folks are more descendants of birds than lily green snub lizards. Be sure ‘n add cream and sugar!
Let There Be Dragons
A tail, along the lines of my soon-to-be-published “A Hundred Tasty Cats & Sherlock Holmes.” I’m sure you’re looking forward. I might explore Victorian London, England in depth, laying out a fantastic place full of cute felines and the world’s greatest female (and other) detectives. Or, I will write a newly themed urban fantasy-sci-fi novel, concerning dragons, human evolution and how to become immortal through your beloved’s rear end!
By Karen S. Cole
Word Count: 600
Well, once upon a time there were people, according to intellectuals. They said, “If there was not a God, we would be forced to invent one.” One day, two married souls, a man and a woman, got together but else-wise. I mean, they handily dropped all ineffectual pretenses, realized they were only animals, and followed a clarion call from Nature.
They entered a car that they owned, drove out to the desert, and stripped off all of their clothes. It was the Red Desert down in the American Southwest. They stuck their people butts up in the air, cracks in them, and began to run around in the desert like that. It took years, no decades, no centuries, no millennia…their passing generations grew smaller. Also, real people joined them. Many other “humans,” in fact, did.
After millions of years, they became small, insignificant lizards. Evolution is a process, and it can leap ahead through the centuries, and backwater until it turns into devolution, which is not Satan worship.
So anyway, it was a lot later, and they still had human brains. But they were different than ours, in an awful lot of ways. Also, the nuclear war that wiped out all of humanity transpired, without our “new” lizard folks. They just survived it, for no known reason, and the cacti around them kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger. So did the lizards. Natural selection began choosing out mostly the huge and more visible lizards to reproduce. You can see it coming.
In a few years, what looked like giant Tee Rexes but sporting the most mellifluous feathers, sparkling scales, gorgeous skin colors, beautiful attractive darks and lights, were stomping towards the former big cities. In order to comprehend their former selves better, they thought inwardly.
“Hey,” said Dinah, “How you doing, Horatio, what is shaking?”
“Earthquakes, we’re making them happen now. I am looking over the scenery, and it must be our honorable ancestors, the people. However, they are obviously dead from nuclear radiation.”
Another female got curious. She wasn’t as brainy as the others, so she strolled lightly over to one of the other buildings. So lovely that she was their Queen, she peered into an office window, gazing at everything inside in a loving way. Her courage was merely inquisitive.
“Oh my God,” she breathed, “There are still people in there, and they are actually doing…something. Why, they are moving around with their arms extended in front of them, moaning, groaning and looking…like white people with racial impurity, or scads of freckles!”
“Is it Mad at Max?” crooned the King. “Yet another Zombie Apo-Calypso rudimentary dance?” He blackly stroked her errant backside. “C’mon, they know better. Let’s take off for where we belong…you’re so right. They’re now what we used to be. Eating them, like we should be doing. Well, it may be better than puking it all up later. . .”
And so they ate those former folks, deserving whatever they got.
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A Disabled Little Girl
EMPLOYMENT WANT ADS: Weekday work, no real money. Relief on weekends possible - not guaranteed. Move to Canada unlikely, wages less than Mexican farm work. No sleep at night ensures that you end up disabled…like they already were. Lack of ability to concentrate; everyone “Knows What You Are - Insane”, while trying to poison you to death with the wrong medications.
Health gone, you used to be a low-level nurse, and now you are painfully waiting to die, mainly at the hands of your own beloved relatives…or intrinsically ruthless strangers. The Inquisition holds NO CANDLES to being a former Home Health Care Aide…LOL!!! Horror writes the boundaries pertaining to Work as one’s obsequiously personal Downfall…it’s the most important thing they measure you by, except for wifedom, husbandry, or how many fishes are in the sea.
My Feminist Horror Story – Not for small kids. For those 16 and up…who may read a tale of Real Life Woe, beyond my reproach…living alone or with others, in a town where Craigslist adverts can lead to death. Newspaper ads do too; they just aren’t as widely publicized. Sexual molestation is mentioned, so it’s NOT for the childish or faint of heart.
For a single person, or the Whole Family? On another veiny claw, the neighborhood…the region…the area…in short, the World? For all you who have enough…of what? Of life, death, paying taxes to strangers…you’ve had enough of…RAPE…and its ugly results. A daughter commits familial “suicide” on one side, and no, she is reasonably safe at Greenlake, partying rarely - working her tanned bottom off for Democracy.
By Karen S. Cole
Word Count: 4,500
Do you think she was diabolical? No, she was not. She was extremely rambunctious. Therefore, she was the nicest, sweetest, goodie-willed person who knocks your life off! Obsequious, she positively, effectively could not ever…walk. On the other hand, drive a car, nor dance. Potentially, pray. In fact, she was quite helpless, and unfortunately, attractive. So very…pretty. White, pure as a silvery lopsided pearl, loaded with enigmatically unreachable charm. On the other hand, somehow, filthy. An object of pornography, scorn, and chaos sans endlessness. Nevertheless, which one was it, ultimately? An apart inescapable nature, or something well worth hooking? Was she a Real woman, or only a memory?
Therefore, the men would enter daily, to take care of her. She meant simple care, easy to get along with –
only a few of those minor little human impulses and nuances that are not so pretty. A crooked nose, an askew face, a tendency to be sharp and tart when provoked. After whoever He or She were felt like nothing happened, nothing they could be caught at…hardly anything. At least, not for which someone else was to blame, other than them themselves. Nothing a good person could not manage, with others. For special political support. Family style, in the face of Chaos, that knows which sex or race or height or race or sex of person is their Jesus. That lone person, that Satan, whom they can manipulate into eternal place…that family “member”. The soul from whom you do not go to Heaven when you die, or somebody else nicer for a change.
Well, it never is any alone person, you know! It takes two to enunciate, even when tangoing is not involved. You have to be in denial of something in order for it to never work. Such as, your own humanity. Therefore, you can be “goodlier” than the other person, dude, woman…whatever it is. Get that job, lift that bale, and get a little drunk…then you land. Maybe, just outside of the Inquisition, questions on a job application nowadays. Not that one question, as there is always more. “My resume” and your life, but dealing with things is never easy. What of the disabled girl?
If this is her story, why is she perfect in every way? Who for? Why she is capable of just sitting totally still, as if already dead…with her organs outside her body, with an illness that should’ve claimed her? Is it so that someone can have a job, and not die on the streets? If she has spinal cicada, say, what is she doing able to eat brains - and breathe? While twisted up AS a human pretzel, what is her purpose in Life, in general?
Moreover, what is Life? Well, some of the men were nice, and took care of her. However, they had a sad tendency to leave for better jobs, schools, and lives of their own. Because the pay was low, just enough to get by on, with her and everyone else. Bad economy, you know. Too short, the inert lack of privacy, combined with the interminable nature of the job…meant they were stranded. They left, quit, burned her with cigarette butts…she did not respond. What she felt to herself, no one will know. It came buried underneath, as if in a distant Universe, where she could communicate…a lack of ability to reproduce children. Yours, not hers.
Assuming in advance, a less serious money issue. Nobody available to take a chance, to believe in someone else hard enough to waltz. To lie enough to believe that His payment is sufficient for the pipers, to buy that children are what you need in Death to become a Parent…immortality. She seemed religious, had no God to pray to, as they were all rapist scumbags. The cat launching inside through her window clawed her face open; she had to pitch it back out, strangling her own Goddess of limited support. Mom cannot beat up Dad; Dad leaves Mom for the vast unknown again.
Do you really think she was faking it and could walk? Good for you, Handsome. Alternatively, I mean Beautiful. Religion does not help, and yet everyone thinks the subhuman involved will someday, during that oncoming “Cataclysmic Event”. In the future. When somebody stops insisting on the meds bandwagon, or heading for an Impossible Dream. While running into what life may steadily supply you with, now? On the other hand, failing that medical care is what saves human relationships. End of story. She could have sex, but not if someone else figured something…out.
That it is NOT the kind of children you dig. Perfect ones? Oriented toward gang behavior, for want of a human mind, imagination, or the ability to fight past air pollution…or radioactive isotopes Three Mile Island…you guess. You wake up and notice these others, and they look remarkably alike. Then you decide nobody but you are a human being, God rest your merry souls. A nuclear half-life is what each girl is born with.
Anyway, one day, her eeriest Prince Charming showed up. This old scruffy bearded person, a chronic longtime boozer, with no income again. There was next to no income in working for her. Do you now sympathize with the disabled person, oh you Handsome Stud you? Oh how wonderful of you – how very, very wonderful. What if that is NOT how it works?
Because she was once, pretty. In her very own way. The way that meant children, so many kids, without there ever being any.
She was a human being, b’gosh! And you can hurt a vulnerable human being’s deepest feelings, and get away with it, right? Well, not hers. Because her feelings did not hurt all that easily. She just kept it bottled up inside her a lot because she thought that all women are disabled next to a big ol’ macho man. However, she forgot about all those little scrunched-up people who could not get a kid either. One strange day. In her own personal way, which was of course pretty…subject to the authorities.
Therefore, along strutted a big Owl macho old drunk man who was kinder scrunched up. He was attractive. Nevertheless, he was bossy. He raped her, extremely cruelly. In his own special way. He was the first one to take it that far, although others had hurt her before when they were supposed to be working for her. He kept saying that only he loved her, in the Whole Entire World. Resolutely, he plunked her down on the unkempt bed, one where she had only wanted children to be born, began fiddling with her vulnerable doohickey, and made her wonder about that.
That was not the right person, though. This old man had finally drank himself to death, and died, right in the middle of the pretty girl needing him to take care of her. What if she did NOT have children? What if that was clearly a bad idea, one that led to another oblivious Hell on Earth? What was normal, or whom could she push around and tell off? What if the murderer was the Real McCoy…well, how to handle a rapist, then.
This real person who got their undivided attention in this shows up later, you see. He is very handsome, and even young. However, he has no income whatsoever, and he really thinks he needs to show off at someone who is worse off than he is. He somehow knows he has got some other broad somewhere, somewhere in his upstairs, who is blonde and pretty and is his total mommy. In fact, maybe it was his Mom, his mental picture of her anyway. He really thinks he deserves that perfect woman, and he never went to look for anyone else. He seems normal to everyone else. He has been around. He married someone, and she split after years of pain and suffering and hardship. So it goes. He said, she says, back, or forth, who knows, but one of them knew more people.
Nevertheless, she was pretty, so very truly cute. She became the girl in the wheelchair, the electric chair that does not kill you, that is. She was even prettier than his wife had been. You see, he could not get the woman in his head out of his mind. It was his mental picture of how subservient his mother used to be. She was supposed to be all “blonde and blued eyed” – you know, eye dye could become the next big thing, and really blind people HAPPENING – and he couldn’t accept anything less out of life. She was supposed to be all perfectly able bodied and able to bear sixty thousand live young. Every day. Of the week. To fend off his imaginary enemies. Who were still there, able to spit together?
Because she was pretty. So very, well – beautiful. Gorgeous. Attractive. Voluptuous. Curvy. Obviously, always twenty and always able to bear live young in droves. Without ever getting pregnant and having that siren wail fill the air. It needs food. Food costs money. Mama in this did not have any such money, just a little. Not enough.
Not having money could bend a man’s mind, don’t you think? Yet he was handsome. So very, supremely handsome. The handsomest man on the face of the planet. You picture him. He looks like you, or so. Maybe like your imaginary children - or the real ones you treasure too. Like the ones, you saw down the streets, who have individual brief lives.
Maybe he is tall, and she is short…in a Wheelchair…dies. Here is where the heart of this story begins, ending passively.
He finally got into taking care of her, but she was either anti-Semitic, anti-black, anti-white, this or that, up or down or sideways, even though she was never anything but polite about all other people, and about him. She was not oh my gosh his mom. Therefore, he started raping her like that on a daily basis. Because she was pretty and out of reach. They could not have sex at all. She was so out of reach and
he was so Daddy, which he kept trying to tell her to get up out of the wheelchair and walk. It always sounded to her like the utmost in cruelty. He could not get it, the skimp.
Because he was thinking it would be more fun to torment her with her inability to walk, he would dance her around the room, then lie her down on the bed and rape her with his fingers before raping her with other unspeakable means.
She was always, all through it, so pretty, so very very very…aw, I will shut up. You know. She stayed that way. Nearly forever, even though he had been hurting her emotionally and physically for years. She finally prayed to God to help her. Then one day, she looked at her helper cum rapist, saying and “Please stop it”…
“Stop what? I’m…not doing anything”, he sighed, fingering her area. He moved it around lovingly, thinking it involved cleaning up. Angrily, knowing he had the right to be upset, he leered down. For after all, isn’t right left sometimes, when you have Dyslexia? And what are men, but an XY chromosome who can barely tell the difference? In a mixed up world, where what is sauce for the goose is good for the gander?
“Stop…raping me,” she sighed, in a nauseating way. Elegant in its repose, like someone who accepted an infinity of torment, while smiling and laughing and otherwise keeping her own selfish life…and working, too?
“You’re too…retarded to know what rape is, my dear. Here, I’ll clean up your BM.” And he did so, for he was only a lowly butt wipe. He cleaned around her perianal area and her anus, but not with a washcloth. He did it with his finger, so very slowly, without really getting around to cleaning her. She was getting infected again, from the poor care she was receiving. It was hard, so very hard, to find a new attendant. They were always men, and cruel to her. They all knew she was going to die on them. When, who knows, and how long before they moved on…to the next job. Without lives or any privacy of their own, or the capacity to save up enough pay to move on to a job where they could “get a life.”
Because. You know. The Dance of Death is oh-so-slow. He had to go and make fun of someone. Backing him into it by utter circumstances. Moreover, he did not have a wife at home because he left her before. Oh, she could take good care of herself. Therefore, she had been worthy of being left behind, but not exactly stranded. She was worthy, his first wife there. Of being, merely able bodied. This disabled little girl was clearly not worthy to God. He could do what he wanted, because God did not love her pretty, little body. Isn’t that what it was for?
Wasn’t his same race, sex or age ex-wife, daughter or mother, or other gorgeous dream figure that does not exist in real life - the most gorgeously pregnable thing you ever did see? Just an ordinary woman, really, with her little gaggle of male and female friends. Able bodied and able to work and able to do anything at all she wanted to do that was within reach. She was a kid in a candy store, when it comes to sexual daydreaming. She could walk, even, and talk, even, and he left her because she was not his mommy, you know. Not his real stereotypically need to defend Mommy, who was dead beyond all such defending…not, he himself. Not, Him!
You defend yourself at all costs, unless you do not. Or, you die! Dunh dunh DUHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!
He slowly dissolved, getting a spurious job that was a bit on the low side. Some people depend on their “good” pasts and their own mental pictures of themselves, to the absolute death. They are twenty in their heads, and they keep thinking Disabled are space fools. THAT THERE IS MORE THAN THE ONE KIND. Apparently, they can have their way with them. Even the people…I mean, they think that about the people, too. That they are their kids. So it goes. They think they can correct their “rude behavior” of not going to the bathroom properly or whatever. In “gay” couples, yet. In addition, they even think they can rape them, both the men and the women, and get clean away with it.
However, the Woman of the house is the Lady, one supposes. The person crossed the line. Did she call the cops? No. She was too scared to do it. She was deeply afraid, of both Him and the Authorities. He kept doing that repeatedly, and she simply was not herself anymore. Even though it had happened to her millions upon millions of times. He, she thought, was just trying to get her pregnant - and didn’t know any better that she was in charge, because he was on his own little superiority trip. It was heavy duty. That is how pretty it was…ugly.
Maybe other people validate. Normal, able-bodied ones. Most especially, able-minded ones. If someone thinks otherwise, it is not long before the whole world “knows you more”. Than they do “other” people. Suddenly, you are a mass murderer…it is okay to kill you. You have NO others. Even after you are, dead - nobody can “get” you. Supposing that got to the point, where it was, for some reason, unacceptable? How tragic, not being able to pick on the mentally ill. Especially when only one “special person” is involved every time, always someone “female” or otherwise different enough to be vulnerable to…modern staffs. In hospitals, you wish to escape and enter the world as the Independent Living Movement.
However, in this story, it takes three to find no sleep:
One day, He stooped down to put his face in it. Mommy saved him, okay. You know what she did. God muster loved her. He finally smiled on her. She grew a big old whopper red fanged mouth, ten feet tall and twelve feet wide, the size of Manhattan Island, yes, she most certainly did, and her handsome prince there backed off a little. He looked at her, went totally gaga and pranced around a little while locked completely in place by his own mortal terror. Having taken His time, God had finally, furtively answered her prayers. He had quizzically given the rapist time to feel sorry for what he had done, which had not happened. The man was gone.
The inhumanly large red maw gaped – no longer a pretty grin. It dripped gallons of saliva down its sides, and then it ROARED as the tongue protruded. In an exciting, story-ridden manner, where you do not know exactly what occurred, but gee, it is yet another vengeance fantasy. That alone, or something incredibly clever that makes fun of the concept, such as actually getting away in a court of law with suing over a PROVEN rape and somehow managing to land a decent figure, millions of dollars. Except if you’re dead, it is safe now and we do not have to worry. On the same hand, your relatives can get all that money, and live like…similar people. Out in the woods, where everyone is the same exact person.
The one scrap of dignity left to her obscene rapist was that he could not scream or say stuff high, “like a woman”. He did get that, for his little boy’s Christmas present - if you like it so much. His real Mom would not have approved. However, did she ever? Then, she ate him, chewing him painfully first, and then swallowing him alive in one big noisy, slurp and pretty – GULP! He was counting on all those All Alike Groupie Whoopee members to save him, but finally, he made it to the only Safe Place there is. The one you think is there, but actually, it is on the other side of your life.
Death, it is perfectly abrupt, don’t you think? Perhaps one goes to Hell, and then one goes to Heaven. Alternatively, we simply slip away, in a hospital, on pain meds. Well, her stretched-out collapsing mouth, fanged with one ton of jagged, disabled-looking pointy teeth, shrunk back to normal size. The next day, she hired a nice, younger girl who answered her simple, inexpensive newspaper ad, as the online advert. The other way was the neighbor girl, but that one joined the Army, you see.
Do not go through Craigslist, where they come to your house to rape and kill, after buying or selling. Come to think, what they were doing before - via newspaper ads. To adults and children. Not to mention teenagers, but fortunately, there are always more for them to kill, they are politicos actually, lone wolves with no meaning. Once you think you’re God, you figure out how to get what you want, a quick death failing to come true in the order in which it receives, not now, where clichés mean a voyage of discovery involving cannibalism.
If you wind down on psych, pain, drugs or other meds, or simply break your own Central Nervous System up, maybe they will reconsider about you ruling the world through other mortal fools, families, and supernatur
al idiots…no, that is determined upon birth. We doubt things. Those who get no realistic sleep at night know this strange tale, but cannot move to Canada and end their long roads there, hoping for a life where you get some Non-Inquisitional relaxation, friendship, love, and inner privacy. Those who need in-home care have only their relatives to turn to; somewhere else, they still turn to those who work for a living, through agencies.
The Home Health Care agency girl is a patented housekeeper, and moves around from place to place, doing housework for everyone she meets. Hands ‘em her card, does not go to college, is saving that idea for a later that may never arrive. She works under the table, collecting her pay and waiting. Once she meets the right man, life will change…nothing much. School, work, and the act of reading bide her time well enough.
Maybe it is because She, the Lady of the House, warned Dear Brownie the New Girl about her mouth. How it can get a little big sometimes, if she is not careful in Every Way - and makes plenty nice. For violence travels afoot, letting you see it is a sterling weed. Growing in the Master’s garden, mercy is the last thing on its petty, engorged fickle “mind”, ruining any chance at a Life you can’t see…by remaining hidden, phonily clairvoyant, unable to communicate with malingering Death.
Then, there is the Worm…it is Johnny, or a long pig. Long pig is slang for human flesh, as it purportedly tastes like pork. More than one annelid, bisexually reproductive helminthic worm, so many more, it is one-quarter of us all, round the globe in fact not fiction, claiming to be tropical – spreading through Love, “Truth” and Kindness. My body thrives with hundreds of them, possibly thousands, eventually millions…leaving my intestines to be flushed into a water system that filters out wastes. Without disability, I wait for a fate involving what could pour out of my eyes, ears, mouth, nose…even the beds of my fingernails…and then stop.
What of the Able-Disabled, Handicapped, Physically Challenged Pretty White Lady? She showed the new brown girl her giganthra red-rimmed mouth, yawning widely only the once. It made quite an impression, making sure she treats her right, even if she has to threaten another innocent girl. An SWT, a Sweet Young Thing, in brown. She would learn to feel sorry…about more things. Thanks to her big mouth, the new Pretty Lady would never, ever leave, her own lips and tongue fatally shutting forevermore.
She does pray to God sometimes. For answers, for His inevitable help. She feels trapped; lifeless, not getting her sleep at night, catching naps during the day, broke, penniless. Someday soon, she must die – or so; go find Love, elsewhere in the midst of Life and Death. Sex talks her into things; it tells her there is a New World to conquer. A man who honestly knows how to make money, or die trying. Unless as usual, he needs what she cannot supply – his idiotic doppelgänger group. If his family of origin plays off the new one, she might be in serious ongoing trouble.
Yet it is just practice for when her infant cries, needs fed. That Lady is not for us, I and my man, she thinks…giant Disabled “babies” do not last. Alternatively, maybe, for many long years, her biological clock could be running out. The State loses the Welfare System. Real people, they do, if they have their own babies, and their own babies, etc. Love is the Answer, but what is the Question? Not on an employment application. Make your way, she reasons, but how will I ever begin to have children? We have to own something, time or a house, lives, a business…a bicycle shop.
The Lady’s new brownie girl is timid, a Lady in waiting, unable to move, not dying from lack of sleep. Living for lack of love. Because she is strong…vain…unsexed…invulnerable…and so humbly patient! When the time comes, her huge ol’ vicious mouth, as in writing and talking on the phone, will move, persuade others, and work for her own good, at long last. If not, when the money runs out to care for the White Woman.
That’s who it was really for originally, and now it is everybody else. In the end, the new girl, brown as she is, starts to drink excess alcohol. ”Almost nobody dances sober, unless they happen to be insane. From even the greatest of horrors, irony is seldom absent.” Multiple sclerosis results from lack of sleep combined with psychiatric medication. Then, you die, after having some live-in help perhaps. “Ultimate horror often paralyzes memory, in a merciful way. But the oldest, strongest emotion of Mankind is fear.” MS destroyed my first husband. I am spastic from having taken psych meds too, but am managing. It’s a minor instability.
“We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far…all life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreaming, and no cause to value the one above the other…
“I have seen the dark universe yawning,
Where the black planets roll without aim,
Where they roll in their horror unheeded,
Without knowledge, or luster…or name.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, ‘A Disabled Little Girl’
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Woody Allen Makes A Scary Sandwich - Horror Pastiche, Stories & Poems Page 14