skonen_blades

Sometimes it’s hard to recognize
the reward you get from not doing something stupid.
We work so well with punishment and bonuses
So when nothing happens at all, it’s like a swing and a miss
An echo in a canyon
The same dinner as before
Life continues to be the slowest roller coaster ever
And only on some level borne of wisdom and experience
Can we sort of tell we avoided something bad
Like broken radar we can hardly make out
I think it’s a flaw
When the jump scare doesn’t happen
And we’re disappointed
When doing the right thing offers no immediate payoff
And we look around for the camera lights
The prize money and the trophy
But it’s just more days of the calendar
With okay weather
No theme music kicks in
We take another regular step
The same as last hundred thousand
But after this particular one
We’re supposed to say “Whew, that was close.”
Even though our heartbeat hasn’t changed at all
“Mundane victory” shouldn’t be an oxymoron
So many things we quietly don’t do,
That we avoid by continuing straight forward
They’re worth a celebration
If only we could feel them more powerfully
So for now we live off of faith
The knowledge of what it is to be just
Counting the blessings
And urging ourselves to be grateful
But that pull is always there
The high diving board and the lake of fire
The need to burn star bright for half as long

For now we stay the course
Thrilled on some level to be safe
But a little haunted



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The phone we found with the boy’s body was troubling me. I turned it around in my hand.

It was late in the police station. My officers had gone home but as the acting chief, I was the one to turn the lights out at the end of the day. The paperwork of leadership. I was by myself. My brain was spinning.

The phone in my hand was an iPhone but the logo I was looking at didn’t have a bite out of the apple. My first thought was that it was a cheap Chinese knock-off. Bu it was also slightly curved. I have to admit, it fit in my hand a lot better than a plain rounded rectangle of my regular phone. I’m not up on my technology. Maybe it was a few generations ahead of mine. But why would a knockoff have a different shape than what it was trying to imitate?

The boy’s body had no ID. It was found in the forest near our town by a hunter. The clothes on the body were a little strange. Bright colours that didn’t go together. One sleeve was transparent plastic. One pantleg was shorter than the other. A copper necklace that looked out of place on a teenage boy. Small cheek piercings like I hadn’t seen before but he didn’t look like a punk or a misfit. Very clean shaven. Nice hair. No dye or strange shaved designs. Lots of hair oil, though. Almost like back in the fifties.

The fads of city kids come and go and I’m none the wiser, old man that I am. We get a lot of travelers through here. This is a small town near a main highway. Half our income these days is from the truck stops ever since the mill shut down.

This boy’s phone. I was looking at the screen now. It appeared unlocked which seemed unusual. The keyboard was standard, caps lock if you wanted and numbers and symbols if you tapped the right button. But there was a third keyboard with symbols I’d never seen. Not just upside-down exclamation points like in Spanish or Chinese characters or another language. At a guess, I’d have to say math symbols but I had been looking online for hours to match them and I couldn’t.

A full keyboard of them.

And the icons. It still wasn’t connecting to our wifi but the icons were confusing me, too. I’m used to games I’ve never seen before on my teenager’s phone. But I recognize snapchat. I recognize facebook. I recognize Google and Youtube. These were like them but different. Snapchat’s ghost logo has no arms. Facebook’s looking had a lower-case t instead of an f. Google was an R instead of a G and YouTube, while still called YouTube, was blue instead of Red.

And it wouldn’t connect to our wifi. It just couldn’t find it.

If I didn’t know better, I’d say he sidestepped here from another place. A different earth.


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Alice didn’t merely travel to wonderland. She escaped there.

Jumping through her own reflection to a land where anything was possible. Where manners mattered and every dream logic puzzle had a way of being solved.

When she came back, she awoke terrified that the dream was over. She was never the same. People thought that she’d been traumatized by where she’d been but in actual fact, she was traumatized by coming back here.

Take Dorothy, for instance.

She spent the rest of her life clicking her heels together when she thought no one was looking. She felt in her heart that Oz was home but her heels would never take her there. The shoes were magicked for the wearer’s place of physical birth, not matters of the heart. She died alone at an old age, smelling nothing but car exhaust and sweat seeping in through the windows. It was cruel that fate let her live that long.

I’ve heard that people who have near-death experiences are similarly affected but I’ve never credited that claim. I mean, if you’ve seen heaven, it’s really quite the simplest thing in the world to get there again. There are a number of ways to die that aren’t suicide if you’re creative.

But these other dreamworlds, that’s a different thing. You can search for centuries for the forgotten toy shop, the hidden doorway, the magical doll or moment in time when the cracks between reality open wide to let a person in for adventure.

It’s a gift and a curse.




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Newton left us a gift. Tesla wrapped it up and Hawking put a bow on top. It was the brilliance of Dr. Panaura that opened it for the whole human race.

Dr. Panaura had found a way to trap energy and shape it. Using accelerator kilns, she’d bind the light with the electricity. By using a series of ceramics and mirrors, she’d weave the energy into a tight overlapping grid. The waves would move in a pattern that generated their own power through recursive timestreams.

Physical relationships warp at higher velocities. Anything with appreciable mass cannot be accelerated to lightspeeds.

In effect, she’d make plates of invisible energy that borrowed energy from past versions of themselves. She knitted light into primitive jointed garments.

The armour tapped into the missing seventeen per cent of the universe. It was a marriage of Newtonian physics and the unified field fueled by funneled electricity.

It worked on a universal scale. It stole kinetic energy but weighed nothing. It was bulletproof in the same way that a planet was. Any force applied to was absorbed.

It could be worn as an invisible suit of armour that nothing could penetrate.

She was hailed as a saviour. Any industry that needed a hard surface benefited immediately. Architectural masterpieces blossomed. The military now had invincibility. Hard materials were possible with no natural matter being used.

The first kiln in room 10 of Berkeley University was referred to as Panaura’s Box.

A little later, Dr. Panaura found a way to record binary information into the peaks and valleys of the waves. Information that could be sent through time.

She set up a receiving station in her office. That receiving station was anchored at 3:45 PM, August 22nd, 2018.

As soon as she turned it on, the messages from her future self came pouring in.

Advice on theories, scores from sports games, inside knowledge on upcoming relationships and a thousand other subjects. Apparently, the future Dr. Panaura had no respect for causality.

Reality shattered.

Dr. Panaura became, in effect, a minor deity. She set up more message depots ten weeks apart and gave them addresses.

She answered questions. She’d forward questions back to the proper message depots and an earlier self would try to find out answers and forward them back to the future.

She employed people. Her earlier selves employed people.

Every message station became a corporation. Every ten days, she set another message depot up. She’d get to a deserted part of the world, set up a beacon, and turn it on. As soon as she turned it on, a building would materialize around it with an employee base that had always been there.

After August 22nd, 2018 at 3:45 PM, there were no more mysteries. Reality became as malleable as smoke in the air.

Every time reality changes, no one notices. It simply becomes the way it’s always been. There is a theory that we are shuffling through realities like an infinite deck of cards. We can’t tell. There is a theory that we’ve ended the universe or created the multiverse.

The only way to live here is to live here. I tried making some bets on upcoming games but they never pan out. Something changes, I guess, and the score changes, so that’s that. I don’t make a fortune and then lose a fortune; I just never had a fortune. If you see what I mean.

I have to accept that what is real right now is all I’ve ever known.

I wonder if one day, someone will send a message back and successfully set the wheels in motion to assasinate Dr. Panaura and put this world back into a place where her discovery never existed. I wonder if that’s even possible.

Not that I’d notice if it happened. This world would cease and I’d be in a world where her invention never existed. I’d never know the difference.


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