skonen_blades

The dripping wallet
The soft cash register
The damp IOU of puberty
That thief
That fae-folk replacer of children
Swapping our little ones for volatile doppelgangers
Turning them into crazed horses set loose on reality's minefield
Improv with consequences
The shape charges of experience
Separating each contestant into either the lucky or the emotionally amputated
Its a spectrum of body horror
Low trauma for everyone
Cursed knowledge bestowed
Brains morphing slug-like into new shapes
Parents revealed as fallible
The magic carpet of childhood is yanked out from under them
And they fall into the stinking soup of pheromones
Its not all bad
There are good times to be had
During this violent graduation
This biological gauntlet
This possession
As hormonal accelerant takes the wheel
And the Sauron eyes of the world
Notice them
Their bodies
Their spending power
Let us pray

Our puberty
Who art a time bomb
Whorehouse be thy name
Thy wet dreams come
Thy thrills be random
At home as they are in high school
Give us this day our pubic hair
And forgive us our awkwardness
As we forgive those who awkward against us
And lead us into temptation repeatedly
But deliver us from permanent damage
For thine is the chrysalis
The reeking transformation
The handful of years that take forever
Amen




tags

You've started keeping secrets
Small things
But it's the beginning
Of feeling the pain of being a parent
Of being on the outside looking in
Of that separation

You are
of us
But you are steadily becoming more of
just you

The extension of trust is so important
Letting you have a secret is so important
Saying ‘okay’ and changing the subject
After you say you don’t want to talk about it
And making it look easy
Is very hard to do
And I want to do it

But it wrestles with my fear for your safety
And no one imagines the worst better
Than a parent

Of course I will respect you
Of course I’ll only press
A little (too much)

But it's so hard to feel
That you are now not ours
That you are now only yours

It's a wrenching that leads to an emptiness
That must be filled with something else
That has to be filled with something else
Before it takes over
And I push you away with my invasive questions
Before I break into a diary
And hate myself with every page I read

The process is slow
And resistance only worsens it
But I have to go with it

So I can be the place you want to come back to
And confide in
If you ever choose to


tags

(A continuation from this https://skonen-blades.dreamwidth.org/390413.html and this https://skonen-blades.dreamwidth.org/397882.html)

Zebras like the cheesy smell inside their cheesy home
Sometimes they leave their giant wheel of cheese to graze and roam

But they come back to leave their u-shaped hoofprints in the cheese
Because the smell of where they live is carried on the breeze

And predators with noses that can smell from far away
Just smell the cheese upon the breeze and carry on their way

You could say the zebras stay inside a nose mirage
A round and stinky house that’s made of nasal camouflage

They can’t sense it anymore. They’ve got used to the smell.
They don’t mind the stench of where they have to dwell

Because they’re safe from predators in there and can relax
And zebra don’t like cheese so they don’t eat the house for snacks

But over here a house of glass is very clear to see
With rich giraffes that like to see outside transparently


With lofty heads atop their lengthy, tall, extended necks
They lounge on all the balconies. They lounge on all the decks.

Their giant swoopy eyelashes blink slowly as they sigh
They sip their tea and nibble leaves and look out at the sky

They all wear silk pajamas, robes, and fancy necklaces
They know that where they live must be the safest place there is

Cause animals can’t see the glass that houses the giraffes
When predators bonk into it then every giraffe laughs

They have a throaty chuckle then go back to sipping tea
Happy and protected by a house that’s hard to see

They can see for miles through each tall, transparent wall
Those rich giraffes are all still there inside it standing tall.

Now over here, a floppy, tasty, house of pancakes waits
Flamingos live inside it with their cutlery and plates


Flamingos take turns cooking up the walls and ceilings here
By making different shapes of pancakes all throughout the year

It’s hard because the house is such a floppy one to build
Pink flamingo pancake architects are highly skilled

When they’re finished their turn building, then they stop to eat
They get a plate, a knife and fork, and find themselves a seat

And take a piece of wall or door or stair or windowsill
Then add syrup, butter, chocolate chips, and more until

They have a stack of pancakes that they just can’t wait to taste
Then they eat and clean their plates so no food goes to waste

Then after eating so much food they have a little nap
They lie on pancake beds with pancake blankets that they wrap

Around themselves like crepes until they sleep enough and wake
Then go back to the kitchen to cook up more house pancakes

Just down the lane from pancake house there one that’s made of cards
It’s built by snakes that keep it safe by also being guards


It’s hard to build a house of cards with only mouth and tail
When every gust of wind or breeze can cause the house to fail

So snakes of every size all have to work together to
Create a house that’s stable that they all can slither through

They have to keep the bigger animals all far away
Since heavy footsteps from large animals can make it sway

Snakes don’t ever step because they don’t have any feet
And they don’t have dirty shoes the floors are nice and neat

Winds collapse some floors and wings but then the snakes rebuild
And in between collapses they play cards. They’re highly skilled.

They like to play all kinds of games inside their card house place
And you have never seen a snake’s impressive poker face


There are lots of houses here all made of different things
Built by those with scales and tails and fur and snouts and wings

Many more than just the few described inside this book
I hope one day that you can go and maybe take a look

What would you build? What would you be? What’d you think you’d do?
If you could be an animal and build a house for you?







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April 30/30

26/30

THE UNEXPECTED PACKAGE

Randolph Beaucoup of the Terran Diplomacy Wing had been selected from fifty candidates for this particular First Contact mission. Little was known about the Marenko other than they were anamorphic pseudopods without discernible features. Smooth gelatinous bags that had the ability to form as many multi-fingered tentacles as needed to build or manipulate technology. The Terrans were still trying to figure out how they saw without eyes and thought without visible brains.

There were large ones and small ones although that seemed to have no bearing on age. There was talk of one the size of a small ocean but it may have been a god myth of some kind. All was unclear at this stage other than the fact that they had space-travel capability and were, by and large, peaceful. The math constructs had been sent and received as proof of intelligence and no weaponry was detected at the landing site.

Randolph stood on the plateau a few steps away from the Terran landing plank beneath his ship, clad in a fishbowl helmet to clearly display his face and wearing a tight spacesuit that showed his musculature to curious species. It was known as the 'nothing-to-hide' approach. The stars twinkled above him. The Marenko balanced in front of him like a transparent rearing slug trying to impersonate a capital S. It was the size of an elephant seal. Unlike slugs, however, the Marenko were unnervingly quick.

The Marenko extended a glittering flower-tipped pseudopod towards Randoplh and paused. Randolph extended his own hand and grasped the pod tip in what, in his experience, was a universal sign of greeting. A sharp pinprick zeroed in on his palm. His suit easily patched the tiny rupture as Randolph withdrew his stinging hand with an involuntary hiss of shock.

Before he could move, the Marenko extended another tentacled pad that slapped wetly up against Randolph's helmet and stuck there.

"Hello Randolph. The earth-name I have chosen for myself is Mary." said a pleasantly-modulated voice. The tentacle was vibrating against Randolph's helmet to produce the sound. "It is a pleasure to meet you. This has been a delightful first contact and I am honored to be the first to produce our communication."

Randolph thought that was an odd choice of words.

"The pleasure is mine, Mary." he replied. "I'm happy to meet you too. I'm curious, what was the purpose of poking me like that?" he asked, tentatively hopeful that the answer would be benign.

"I needed a small tissue sample to produce our communication. You are in me now, growing. Soon you will be large enough to leave yourself here and then we can talk after you leave."

Randolph couldn't understand the words. The sentence must been parsed wrong in the alien's nascent attempt at translation. "I'm afraid I don't understand, Mary." he said.

"Look closely at my center, Randolph." said Mary.

Randolph looked closer at the core of the huge alien's wavering, smooth gelatin. There, in the center, curled up and twitching, was what looked like a tiny human baby.

A tiny baby with transparent skin and gelatinous bones. A tiny baby with dark hair and dark eyes, just like Randolph. It grew as he looked at it. A Meranko-Human hybrid of some kind.

"This version of you will stay here. We will converse. It will have your memories but it will be of my race, too. After a short amount of time, you may come to collect him and talk to him as well to gather your own information."

"Uh.....what?"responded Randolph eloquently.

"I am, as you say, pregnant." said Mary.





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The red landscape tells me slaughter took place here. Either that or the sun likes to make the prairie look like blood. As sure as rabbits can’t climb ladders, the sperm cells around here have teeth. Go ahead and ask the buildings to take a swing at you because they’ll do it. There are swarms of insects on these desert highways that’ll ram a car off the road. Big-headed demolition derbies advertise for orange juice. Children’s drawings try to make songs about strong boys beating horses. Footballs players hang off of helicopter struts in a fight to the finish above the super bowl.

“It’s not a mask” he says. “These are my eyes.” And then he comes in close.

The scarf is longer than the child wearing it. Her sentences sound like letters being shoved through a winter pinball machine. Her sign language is all Japanese cartoons and pastel capitals. Her eyes are a raven watching old Madonna videos. Her sister and brother are fictional advertisement from the fifties. Oil has not yet run out, their eyes say. Animals can’t go extinct. Their hope is a flower underneath a windmill.

The amusement park is brightly colored to attract the young.



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Dead man’s thunder is as loud as it needs to be. They always say “as the crow flies” but crows don’t fly in straight lines. Here lies a man who didn’t know his aglet from his merkin but he knew that alphabetically, hell comes before holy. So go ahead. Have a big drink of house fire. Telling you your shortcomings is like complaining at a McDonalds.

We all take turns winning and losing. As far as I see, I got out when the getting was good. It’s hard to throw playing cards into a hat from far away but with repetition, it’s possible to get good at it. It’s even harder to throw postcards down to Earth from Heaven.

This is the prayer book of my chest falling open. These are the drooping flowers of your time-killing words. You have the lazy grace of a tall woman not yet yearning to be young. Let me shiver the rain out of where your trees touch. Let me seizure against your missing tooth. Cover me in blankets and bring winter into my heart again. You are all the reasons I’ll ever need to keep warm.

I am a treehouse tenant. A swimming pool tour guide. A garment worker pretending to be a helicopter.

You are the folded census form with matching last names. You are a tax return made of bridges to the future. You’re a natural disaster with the best consequences.

If math counts, then the square root of us will be greater than the sum of her parts.




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A dragon-skull reminder of how angels taste. A glowing amulet from a forgotten time of sorcerers used as a night-light for the young one. The tornado of fire in the fireplace lights the kindling. A closet full of head-dresses from different kingdom’s kings given to the court magicians. Seventeen different baptism chalices. Most for water, some for oil and one for blood.

The tomes of lore have applesauce in between the pages. The tapestry of the fates, hard-won in a battle with a hydra that lasted seven months, has a yogurt stain on it. There is a book bound with human skin that has a drawing on the front in crayon. A clumsy heart to be precise. This simple act of child’s love has nullified the entire thing.

Wizards are great for teenagers but they suck at toddlers. Even by a magic-wielder’s standards, a child can cause an immense amount of damage.

Goretusk the Conqueror Mage, veteran of the Battle of the Never-Ending Eclipse, writer of chapter seven of the One Book, keeper of the remaining True Orb of Seeing, inventor of the most powerful storm spell put to page, stood looking down at his child.

His child had a mouthful of ink and was rubbing his hands all over the discarded parchment of the last remaining Aquanomicon Manual on Earth and cooing a song.

Goretusk held back a scream for the hundredth time since his wife had left him and forced a smile.




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If you're reading this, then you're human. I believe I have all of your addresses in my communication unit. If the records are correct. I am the Royal Babysitter. I'm drunk and if I don't get fired for this, consider this my resignation.

The queen of Earth is a tragic figure. She is eight years old. I am her guardian. We are all that's left of the royal family. We are two of the eight hundred humans left in the universe. As you remember, Earth itself was destroyed two years ago on Christmas when most people had gone home for the holidays.

Having recently joined the galactic council, there were only initial stage emissaries from most of Earth's countries out in the newly established embassies scattered around the Great Rim. There were long waiting lists on Earth for the new positions that came up. Politically, Earth's future looked bright.

No one was left in the aftermath of Earth's destruction to claim responsibility but it's thought that religious extremists maybe have created the small black hole that destroyed it. No recording satellites survived the destruction. Post-apocalypse analysis by the Vorlan'ta temporal forensic team indicated that the collapse started off the coast of Angola. No known terrorist groups had a home base there and that kind of technology shouldn't have been present there. So who knows? It will always be a mystery.

The influx of xenoreligions into Earth's databanks had been fascinating for the philosophers but tragic for the dominant religions of Earth. When faced with concrete evidence that their beliefs were merely opinions, many of the top-tier religious men of power took a non-tolerant stance to aliens. Backwater hicks. It's because of them that travel off of Earth slowed to a crawl in those early days.

Same with the governments. Before the firewall was circumvented by a few brave teenagers in Texas, Earth's public was only slipped information in drips of highly-spun tidbits. The more information the government agencies could hog to themselves, the better. Our race's inclusion in the council and eventual permissions to leave the planet took much longer than usual because of their caution.

So many more of us might have been out in the universe at the time of the implosion.

Right now, I'm looking at my passport with it's ridged, iridescent surface. I'm looking at the play of light across the simplified Earth embossed on the cover. It runs out in ten years. With no Earth left, what is a year? When this passport runs out, will I even be able to get a new one? Perhaps I'll be issued a default galactic council passport instead with The Late Earth as my planet of origin.

The Late Earth. We are a lost tribe now. Earth's child queen, Abraxa, is guaranteed a seat on the council as a representative of our race. She was left here with me as a punishment while the rest of her family went home for Christmas. The survivor's guilt is eating me alive. As a race with no home planet and a small population base, she has little to no power. And because she is a child, she has no interest in fiscal, economic, or geopolitical policy. We've joined the ranks of the Morcana and Fleezles in terms of innefectuality. We're little more than tourists killing time in between meetings.

Projections say that it will take centuries for us humans to achieve the numbers we used to have. Personally, I'm despondent. There are several races here that are able to have sex with humans and there are even six that are genetically compatible. I, myself, have fathered four half-breed children in the last year. I don't plan to stop. I'm fascinated by the mating rituals of the other races.

If there was anything that destroyed our race, it was our belief in our own purity. I hope that in a century, there are no pure-bred humans left. I intend to dilute our race's genes amongst the rest of the races so that only echoes survive.

I recommend you do the same.





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I recognize some of the faces staring up at me. The rain is pattering softly on the top of the forensic tent, keeping the crime scene dry.

I’ve seen these faces on photocopied posters in shop windows in the poor part of town. We don’t post pictures on milk cartons around here. That’s for the rich. For children the world cares about.

The only thing that could have led them into a trap was hope and trust. Kids have so much of that no matter how bad the world gets.

I never considered myself to be a happy guy but when I look back on who I was five years ago, before I started this job, I see a rosy-cheeked simpleton who practically skipped to the academy. In my mind’s eye, I look like a five-year-old kid, too stupid to see this life coming. Clean-shaven and optimistic.

Now here I am, looking down on dead faces recently uncovered. Their eyes are clouded but other than that, they just looked shocked. Pale with surprise. Their young faces look into my mind’s eye like it was a mirror. These kids, swimming in a shallow grave like exposed fish, remind me of who I was so long ago.

These days, I have a huge beard and I started smoking again because nothing matters. When the boss comments on my hygiene, I tell him to fire me. He hasn’t yet. As long as I stay away from the television cameras, he says, I can stay. I do good work.

I think that I get good results from crime scenes like these because I can’t imagine a life where this is possible. I try to understand. I look at all the details, waiting for it to make some sort of sense to me. Sometimes I uncover clues that lead us to a perpetrator but even if that happens and I get transcripts of the interrogation, it never makes sense to me.

I’m on the hunt for answers in the worst part of the human condition.

A spray of dirt lies across the minnow-pale chest of the boy on the top. There’s a white girl’s freckled arm poking out of the dirt beneath him and above that, a shock of red hair. I can’t see her face. The forensic team is on its way to carefully dig up the rest.

I think of numbers here. There are currently 82 unsolved child disappearances in the city’s case files. That’s for the last three years. I figure most of them were snatched by anxious parents in divorce cases. They’re probably hiding out somewhere, full of candied attention and take-out dinners in motel rooms.

I’d put the body count in this ditch at a rough guess of twelve, knocking that number down to 70 or so.

I feel like we just found out where the Pied Piper put those kids from that story.

Already, I can see a bit of a boot print and and a cigarette butt. That could give us the weight, shoe size, approximate height, and blood type of whoever buried these flowers. The killer was rushed. We might get a break.

For now, I’m just staring at the scene, trying to let an understanding sink into me.

It’s not happening.



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Last Thursday, an out-of-breath girl with dirt on her face asked me for a place to hide.

I work at a newsstand. I watch the world go past me.

She was young, maybe nine or ten. She looked desperate and panicked. The street was crowded with the business rush. A sea of dark blue suits and umbrellas and there she was like little red riding hood in a forest staring up at me, a slash of colour standing out and begging me for safety.

Her eyes told me I had less than seconds to make a decision.

I don’t know why I did it. I reached forward and took her hand. She weighed hardly anything. She gave a little hop to help me as I swung her up out of the rain and over the counter into the newsstand with me. She curled up by my feet, shaking and wet.

I resumed staring forward like I always do. It was easy.

Three men ran past, shouldering through the ranks of well-dressed men. Umbrellas were jostled. People complained. One woman was knocked over.

The three men had long faces and dark eyes. The suits they had on looked out of date and worn. They were wet from the rain and they didn’t care. Something about them looked feral. They cast around with their eyes, looking for the girl. They looked at me and past me.

One of them paused, cocked his head, and swung his head back to look at me. I felt like I was being scanned by a machine. I stood like a statue and looked back at him with what I hoped was the look of a salesman hoping to make a dollar.

“Newspaper, sir?” I asked, passing my hand over the day’s editions.

With a curl of his lip, the thin man resumed the chase. Within a minute, the three hunters were long gone. I couldn’t help but think of them as a pack.

I looked down at the girl. I offered to help her up.

With a derisive smirk, she ignored my hand, stood up by herself and smoothed out her dress.

“Men.” She said in a voice more adult than her years. “So predictable.”

She looked up at me then. The flush on her cheeks was makeup. She gave me a look that told me that I had just helped the wrong person.

She smiled. Her teeth were filed to points. She made a quick movement towards me and I flinched. That made her laugh.

She spun around, crouched down on all fours, and with a sprinter’s grace, she ran out of the dog door.

I stood and watched the small door oscillate to a stop. I listened to the rain. After a few minutes, I went back to staring ahead and hoping someone from the business rush would buy a magazine.




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