skonen_blades

It’s astounding to me that someone
That took up so much space
Can be gone
And then, years later,
Still be gone




tags

The linear ladder of death
Is one we’re all familiar with
The way it’s supposed to happen is:

A pet or two
A grandparent
Then another
(actors and musicians your parents liked and looked up to)
Possibly a friend or two by accident, addiction, or their own hand
One parent
Then another
(actors and musicians you yourself liked and looked up to)
A few people you were acquainted with, not too much older than you
Then it’s close friends
Maybe your spouse if you don’t go first
Then it’s you

With the hope that your children, if you have them, have outlived you
With the hope that each rung prepares you for the next one

But sometimes the rungs happen out of order
And you become someone that people can’t quite relate to
A tragedy with sharp edges that can scarecrow a conversation
People tighten smiles and nod with love and ignorance
Helplessly uncomfortable around the reminder of you
Or wanting to help, help, help

The rungs can shuffle and jostle for position
Making each step a gamble
Life becoming less predictable and more valuable much too early
Sidestepping some people out of the flow of normal
It pierces the veil for those unlucky few
Pressuring them to look at what others have the luxury to shun
They’re forced to rush up and then back down the ladder

There can be a magic to it
Like x-ray vision
A power to knowing how capricious death can be
How whimsically random existence is
How fragile and chaotic
But it’s cursed knowledge

The thing about ladders, though
Is that it’s better to have people bracing it for you
Friends that hold on to it and stabilize it
Giving you support so you don’t fall off




tags

And old age will wear me
Like I wear clothes
And cancer will claim me
Like settlers claimed territory
And I will end
Mid sentence
Like no stories do
All of our lives end interrupted
My body adding to the billions of footnotes of history
That are only ever read or referenced
By a select few friends
Until they too die
Which is a comfort
Temporary
Transient
Us



tags

The sound of the cards hitting the table was like a shark giving up on life. A drainpipe stuffed with explosive diarrhea on a stormy night finally giving up the blockage to the rain in a gush beside the house. It was a flat sound of dismay lost among many others.

In a casino, life savings get lost every second. People drown in amongst the waves of jangling noise and flashing lights. Sure there are distractions to make sure that you don’t leave, that you don’t look down, that you don’t go to sleep. But there are also distractions to make sure you don’t notice the people around you dying.

Juggy Peters had just lost his entire house and was in debt for 500 thousand dollars. And it wasn’t debt owed to the nice kind of person that would loan money to losers in Nevada. Juggy wouldn’t have hands in the morning if he was lucky. He’d be dead if he wasn’t.

Reeling, he stepped back from the busted hand, the shit river, and the thieving flop that had killed him. Of course he blamed the dealer. Of course he blamed the cards. Of course he blamed the gods themselves. He had felt the track. He had felt the real winter of luck coming spiraling down the slide into his body. He knew he’d been possessed by the probability dragon. He could feel it searing his veins. He eyes glowed with x-ray right choices and no whammies.

He maintained that he wasn’t wrong about that.

As he tried to shimmy around the slots, possibly even in between the air molecules to another dimension, his doom gave him a lightheadedness. This was the end of a very long road. A road he was tired of.

He didn’t recognize self-destruction or implosion. He wondered if he would recognize insanity. His lovers and wives had all left. His children didn’t speak to him. He had no friends except a royal flush, full house, or four of a kind.

The problem was that he had been really good. Untouchable for an entire year.

After that, it was like jumping out of a plane in a great parachute. A beautiful, slow, and totally unstoppable descent.

Even this casino was a last straw of sorts. The big houses wouldn’t let him in anymore after those vulgar displays of spittle and rage. Not that it made a difference. A few cocktail servers had to change their uniforms after he splashed drinks on them. A few bouncers had to wash their suits after he bled on them. A few decks of cards needed to be switched out after he threw them. Just ripples after a small rock hitting a pond. Minor rearrangements of the taught elastic fabric of reality, immediately oscillating back to straight and static. Like a plucked string shuddering back to normal.

He hadn’t caused any hardship. He’d barely caused annoyance.

What a greased slide his life had been. Nice and easy down the chute.

And here he was. Not at the bottom yet but very near the impact waiting for him at the end.

He straightened his tie and headed out the front of the casino. He wasn’t going to be thrown out of this one.

He took two steps.

He felt the large, polite, gentle-for-now hand on his shoulder and looked up into night-time sunglasses perched on a very flat boxer’s nose.

“Juggy Peters?” graveled the wall of flesh stuffed into the black suit.

“What? No. He’s back there at the roulette wheel. My name’s…….yeah. I’m Juggy Peters.” he said. The reflex of running kicking up a last rabbit of spasming self-preservation before laying still.

“Nice. Nice. That’s what I like to see. Let’s go the limo. Donnie’s waiting. We know you don’t have the money. It’s okay. It’s okay.” he soothed and slowly pushed him towards an open limo door. It was like being pushed by the ocean. No resistance was possible. He slowly surfed into the car, pouring into the leather seat. The car even rocked just the smallest bit on its suspension. A small sway before settling.

Donnie was inside sitting across from him. The door closed. The limo pulled away. Donnie leaned forward.

“You know, Juggy. I like these moments. It’s because of the honesty, y’know? You don’t have to promise me some bullshit promise and I don’t have to bullshit that I believe your bullshit promise. We both know this is it. You came quietly and you’ve always been a stand-up guy so I’m going to do what I can to make sure it’s not painful and if you want me to get word to any of your people, I can do that, y’know?” Donnie said to me.

Donnie was Juggy’s age. That made it worse. It made it evident that he’d left the right track some time ago. If Donnie had been twenty years older than Juggy, he could have kidded himself that with the right win and the right moxy, he could straighten up. But no. There’d be no straightening up. That was evident.

“No. No people. You don’t have to send word to anyone.” said Juggy.

“Good. That’s good. Sad, but good. Makes things easier all around. You sit back and enjoy the ride. We’ll be in the desert in about an hour. We can talk if you want. I’m a good listener.”

So Juggy talked. He told Donnie about his life and his failures and his hopes and his ideas. He poured it all out. Even the dark secrets. He wasn’t sure when it became a confession or when he started crying but it all happened. It sounded so short when he finally said it all out loud. So depressingly normal. Just another average human bottoming out. Just another death for avoidable reasons in Vegas. His whole life, his whole list of things to say, didn’t even take the hour.

When Donnie knelt him down in the salt flats and aimed the gun at his forehead, Juggy closed his eyes and took the donkey-kick bullet that shattered through the stained glass window of his mind as a kindness.


tags

The day before the day before the day before I die
(The pre-ante-penul-timate-al day I mortify)
Will be a day I spend with friends and family and fun
I will not know that day will be the third-to-the-last one
I will not feel the death that’s coming shortly for me, no.
The death that comes the day after the day after tomorrow
I’ll be thinking randomly about those random things
That we all think about, that having conciousnesses brings
My bills, my ex, my deadlines, as Morissette once said
Or plans about a future I won’t have because I’m dead
I’ll gaze into my partner’s eyes, my daughter’s two eyes, too
Without the knowledge that three days from now they’ll both look to
A doctor’s horrifying words, a lawyer’s will to read,
A funereal domicile mausoleum’s need
To know if graves in grounds to dig or fires to be lit
Are wished for and what words are good to write for the obit
I’ll know none of that because I won’t know that it’s near
I’ll have no worry, tension, sadness, stress, fatigue, or fear
Besides the normal levels of those things that I possess
That ebb and flow within the hearts of all of us, I guess
That day will be a day like any other day I live
I’ll give the love that’s in me that I have the will to give
And pass the time without the knowledge just how temporally
Triply truncated these last few days are going to be.
But just as usual my common soul will swoop and fly
The day before the day before they day before I die


tags

A stuntman in the shower slips upon a bar of soap.
A boxer trips and breaks his neck while calmly skipping rope.
A legendary veteran looks left instead of right
A speeding garbage truck collides and kills him in the night.

A woman who beat cancer seven times chokes on a steak
A kung fu master slips and falls and drowns inside a lake
A UFC champ locks himself out of his snowy car
One Alaskan winter, late at night, when help is far

A fireman who rescued families mixes up his drugs
A world-class philanthropist gets bitten by some bugs
An eye doctor who specialized in helping blind eyes see
One day finds out the hard way of a deadly allergy

A scientist who cured diseases ate some tainted meat
A racecar driver trophy-winner’s shoelace tripped his feet
A single mom who raised 8 kids and raised them good and strong
Just had a stroke while exercising just a bit too long

Death shows up in stupid ways for those both strong and free
Randomly, perplexingly, and unexpectedly
One thing I can guarantee; there are no guarantees
So make the most of every day before you rest in…



tags

White clam chowder and over-easy eggs. Soup and eggs for short.

Mass was the problem with colonizing. Getting mass near C was expensive. The smaller the load, the better. Sending ten thousand colonists was impossible.

But sending ten thousands eggs and ten thousand loads of semen was way cheaper.

The ship had a chilled cargo of those two ingredients to make human babies. Womb ships, they were called. They had a skeleton crew of scientists, techs, teachers, and caretakers trained to take on whatever challenges might arise at first contact with the target home but after they’d landed and seen that everything was alright for seeding, they’d get underway.

The birthing tanks would be unfolded and irrigated with dehydrated amniotic solution. These giant uterariums would then be flooded with the soup and eggs slurry sometimes referred to as brunch. The old exponential dance would start and babies would pop up like strawberry Christmas lights on the vine. Tendriled, manufactured, multiumbilicals would snake out and attach themselves to a thousand belly buttons. Each tank was filled with fraternal millituplets.

Wait time was the human usual. The children would be boosted with learning enhancers and xenoviral protection. A small percentage were always lost to errors in cell replication no matter how tailored the dna but the average yield was 90% or 900. Harvest would happen in two-year stages, nine hundred per year. This was called the familial ladder. Ten years of baby making before shutdown for 9,000 humans.

The crew would foster them with help from the AI adoptives, working as a team to cram as much knowledge and mental health into them from the get go before they took on their new world.

It was a system that had worked twelve times before. Twelve Edens had successfully flowered with no humans needing expulsion from angry gods.

This was going to be unlucky thirteen.

The tailored enzymes would fail and the entire crop would be born sociopathic and cruel unbeknownst to the crew. As the children grew, they schemed and the crew began began to meet with accidents. Before any of them figured out was what happening, they were gone.

The children were geniuses. As the other batches reached fruition and were born, they were taken in by the first two waves and taught to be just as awful.

The planet survived and flourished. They developed weapons and a reputation. They broadcast torture videos and vile non-consensual pornographic videos. Their system of government was opaque. It seemed like anarchy but they had such organizational skills.

Their planet is isolated. Quarantined. Embargoed. Struck off the records as a failure, they’re monitored for signs of extra-system aggression. They’re an embarrassment.

A closeted mistake until sixteen minutes ago when their entire planet, now decades into post-womb colonization and nearly five generations deep, completely disappeared off of everyone’s scans.

And reappeared near Earth Prime bristling with nuke barrels and planet crackers pointed at our race’s home.

The pirate planet had come home, prodigal son returning.

They didn’t open fire immediately but they did send a message system-wide on all channels before they started the war.

“No more wombships.”

After a heated exchange of nuclear fire that the pirate planet lost, they drove their planet straight into Earth. Terran defenses didn’t stand a chance.

We no longer use wombships for colonization but we are still trying to figure out how those little bastards made a whole planet capable of faster-than-light travel. None of the other Edens have come anywhere near that kind of technology. The philosophical implications of their success don’t bear thinking about.

Evil might be smarter than good.




tags

It’s a beautiful day and Zaccheus Jackson is still dead.
It’s a beautiful day and Robin Williams is still dead.
It’s a beautiful day and Mark Steinberg is still dead.
It’s a beautiful day and my father is still dead.

I feel like I want to tell the sun to shut up.
I can’t understand the arrogance it takes for nature to keep on making beautiful days.

I remember after 911, the news networks kept trying to put a spin on the attack to make it seem more horrifying and momentous than it was and they couldn't. I was so big and so real that there was no way they could exaggerate it. I feel the same way about tributes to the death of Robin Williams. It's like no words can really even touch it.

And now I feel that about Zach.

I wake up and it’s still true. I wake up and it’s still true. I wake up and it’s still true.

Jessica Mason Paul said about her beloved dog “It’s not that he died. It’s that he’s still dead.” and I feel that.

In my best dreams, a freight train was hit and killed a Zaccheus. It makes more sense. And then I wake up and this seems like the dream.



tags

At the funeral, I kept thinking “How can someone be dead on such a beautiful day?”

And when I was wondering how it could be possible for him to be gone, I realized that there were literally billions of excellent people that were also not there at that moment.

My best friend, had I been born in 1540, was not there. The love of my life, had I been born in 500 BCE, was not there.

My father. A few people I went to school with. Another friend. One ex-lover.

The best philanthropist the world would have ever seen had he been born during the internet age was not there. The world’s leading expert on viruses had she been born in a time when women were even allowed to be in the sciences was not there.

It made me think about everything that’s good and bad right now, about how many people were not there enjoying that beautiful day, and the fact that I was there enjoying it.

I felt like every death made my life sweeter and that I owed it to the dead, the numerous, numerous dead, to enjoy the day instead of being insulted by its insolent beauty near the body of my friend.




tags

It’s called a rift ticket. It’s the assignment you get when you’re not going to come back. Sometimes it’s handed out as a punishment. Sometimes it’s given as a reward. People that have lost their entire family and really want to go somewhere else and they don’t care where, for instance.

Ten broken bottles in the kitchen sink and Sarah couldn’t care less. Flies help themselves to leftover plates of food from two weeks ago. Sarah has watched the wallpaper for a month now, willing herself to forget her child’s dimples and the smell of Steven’s neck. The accident was a small one by this city’s standard. Just two fatalities. The funeral was handled quickly with a minimum of fuss. One long coffin and one short one. Sarah’s daughter was the only daughter and only grand dauther. The funeral didn’t have too many people there.

Her career in the atmoforce tactical support tied her to the military even though it wasn’t a pure combat position. She applied for a rift ticket two days ago after realizing that the wallpaper wasn’t going to change and by extension, neither was this planet or the fact that her child and husband were gone.

Her communicator pinged and a turquoise notification bloomed in the corner of her vision. She blinked to open it, too slowly at first. She blinked quicker to activate it and wiped her hands on her dress in an unconscious school time gesture to look better for the camera phone while it unfolded to take up the top quarter.

Rift Ticket confirmation. Sarah smiled and the notice, scrolling downwards to see the time and place. Tomorrow at four in the afternoon was her gate appointment.

She leaned back and kept staring at the wall, the smile evaporating off of her face slowly as she settled in for the wait.

No need to pack. No need to even change.

The Rift was a crack in the now, a crack in the here. It had been opened by a volley of experimental weapons during the moon independence war. Halfway between earth and the moon, a violet glowing fissure calmly glittered like an aurora borealis around a split in reality. A crevasse from here to no one knows where.

Everyone that went through was given a package of tracers and homing equipment to let the scientists back here know what was happening.

Ten years it had been there. We’d starting sending our garbage through it. We even send a nuclear missile once. Nothing.

Heartbeat and pulse information come back normal on the people that have been sent through but no voice transmissions have come back.




tags