skonen_blades

You summer waterslide boomerang.
You Christmas light souffle.
You chocolate sundae dragon.
You maraschino clown nose bobbing in bathtub martinis.
You hurricane masquerading as a pillow fight.
I’ve seen your side eye.
I’ve seen your magic wink.
I’ve received your silent jokes meant just for me like thrown diamonds.
I’ve seen your private hands and been grateful for permission.
I’ve been behind the door of your warmth, included and held, valued and separated from the cold knife of the outside world.
I’ve lived nose-deep in the cave of your neck, breathing all of you through me.
You memory.
You left turn.
You dopplering siren falling down the well of years.
You expired train ticket.
You nostalgic echo.
You valued dream.
You body part.
You chunk of me that still vibrates, embedded in the loosening cords of me.
You excuse to tip back and feel.
I have missed you.
I will miss you.
I miss you.



tags

Underwear comes in flavours, like a rainbow of mistakes.
Your warning signs were covered in camouflage spandex.
Elephants never forget, camels can go days without water, and you could hypnotize pinecones.
I knew violins less elegant than you.
You were a puzzle with too many pieces.
Trashcan carnival.
An optical delusion.
I made magnet with your steel-toed bunny slippers
Cat Ladies, Dog Men, and Horseshoe Crabs with buck-fifty teeth.
You pulled the pin and threw the donkey tail
There’s a reason why lightning seeks the ground.
It’s you.
You danced for the string puppets.
You rebel yelled the wrestler’s belt
Your sonar pings meant nothing on the prairie
You threw too many forgetful boomerangs
You were a shaved rabbit in a wig race.
A stay-puft marshmallow ballerina
A licorice black belt
The moral of the sorry
Your eyes pentagrammed the demons in the meek
Seances turned into alarm clocks when you walked by
Museums woke up like bears in the spring
Forget-me-nots got amnesia
Dill pickles started to wish they were candy canes
Spacesuits longed to be bikinis
Horseradish wanted to change its name to whipping cream
And it rained Nobel prizes
I’ve seen tornadoes with better brakes
I’ve smelled house fires less dangerous
You oceaned all the swimming pools and continented all the islands
Just by existing in our line of sight
All up in our grills like a sweating lunch-rush short-order cook
I wasn’t curtains but I played them on t.v.
I didn’t fall to pieces but I did try to scatter
You were the television static to my arctic mind
I wished you every kind of best that there is
I wanted to fondue myself
And memorize the drape of your leg
The nape of your crunk
And the snapping fingers of your grin
I can never remember your eyes
But I hear all over you
Your memories spiderweb across my face in the dark
You are not recent.
And I am not old.
But together, we were the grossest sandwich I couldn’t get enough of
An acquired taste that I acquiesced to
We met in meat
And even with tired teeth
Even with damp sockets where my hope used to be
I wash myself in the forgetful water of your absence
Blessing the time we didn’t have
Regretting the spending of it
Wishing I could keep it.
Wishing I could hoard it.
And live off the interest.


tags

The problem was their terrific understanding of math regardless of having no spoken or written language.

Both of our teams are here on the First Contact asteroid, formerly Vesta in the belt. It’s a neutral meeting ground selected for this purpose. This is the 8th race we’ve met here and they are so far the most unusual.

The Cashnishi, named after Dr Cashnish who discovered their ship’s trace pattern as it entered the solar system, understood math on an instinctual level, not unlike savants here on Earth. It could be likened to catching an orange. If a person tossed an orange at a human, the catcher would need to perform complex calculations of the orange’s parabola and the intersecting angle needed for that window of probability to catch the orange. However, no conscious math goes through the catcher’s head. It was like that for the Cashnishi but on a much higher scale.

They wanted to go to space so they made it happen. They intuited how much thrust it would take and how much fuel would be needed and the necessary tensile strength of the materials involved. They figured out faster-than-light travel in moments. Design and construction took the same amount of time it would have taken here on Earth but the basis for the engines took no time at all. Several groups got together into one group and made ships. To them, it was as simple as that. Instinctual, intuitive math leading to production. Not a higher brain function like ours but something on a level of hunger or attraction.

The deeper mystery was how they communicated with any complexity. They seemed to only ‘speak’ in intent. They had no trace of being telepathic in a way we’d know it but like-minded groups would gather and do what they wanted to do, knowing the end goal. Sometimes for minutes and sometimes for entire lifespans like the Cashnishi astronauts/ship engineers here.

They germinated bulbous memory pods on their backs during their life. These pods were harvested at death and eaten, passing on the memories. No matter where death occurred, it was instinctually the highest priority to them to harvest the pods. They lived in memories, did whatever they felt needed to be done, and knew math in a way we could not. They seemed more primitive than us yet they were here, escaping their own gravity well and breaking the light-barrier in a giant blue ship to discover other races.

Their research on us is stimulus response in nature. Our first contact team is on edge. The Cashnishi shout at them, coo at them, touch them, slap them, change colour like cuttlefish, tap out rhythms, and then stare at our team’s responses, committing it to memory. The memory pods on their backs writhe with the new information.

The separation of mind and memory is interesting. They seem to have a practice of disconnecting from memory and just sitting in a form of ‘meditation’ if we had to give the state a name.

They read our body language like we’re shouting. I feel as if they know our team very well and understand humans on a deep level. All of our written knowledge is useless to them, however. We cannot give them our memories and we can’t show them our records. Communicating our history to them is impossible. Video seem to get across to them but only in a gestalt way like they’re watching a montage.

The tallest one keeps looking at me. I’ve named it Wendel. I’m not sure how to tell them that they should probably steer clear of us. They seem so naïve. But maybe I’m projecting.


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“During the mission, your memories are yours. After the mission, they belong to the military.”

The sergeant had droned on at the beginning of this op. It was a standard briefing. I remember seven similar briefings followed by months of blank space in my head. Ever since I was a little girl, I wanted to be a soldier.

We were on a stealth run in Tehran. The radioactive crucible that used to be Qom was a warning shot but they hadn’t listened. Or rather, they hadn’t aimed their warheads away from the east coast of the states.

Our non-reflective gear made us into shadows on the night floor, oil on the city streets while the scared civilians stayed locked inside their houses, praying. We made our way to what our intel told us was the squawk box. It was our job to disable any tripwires and alarms so that beta team could slit the throats of the button-pushers in the underground lobby quietly.

It was real wet work. Proper analogue. None of this remote-control warfare. I was happy to be a part of it.

Because of the memory wipes, none of us knew if we’d worked with anyone on the team before. I knew some of the other players from enjoying each other’s company here and there on R&R and from declassified training but for all I knew, we’d either never been on a mission together before or we’d saved each other’s lives a bunch of times in past missions. It took a special kind of mind to roll with that.

The speakers above us blared the prayer. That meant it was 4:28 in the morning. There was rustling from all of the shuttered apartments around us as people woke, knelt and prayed. I felt powerful, knowing that I was an instrument of what they were afraid of.

We edged up near the fence of our target building. It was a broadcast station set up to look like a corner store. Using the prayer as cover, the six of us slid bonelessly up the wall and through the windows. A ganked keycard allowed us to bypass the keypad into the stairwell and ghost down the stairs to the sub basement.

The sweating, nervous men were looking at the radar screens for any form of airspace incursion. The feeling of tension in the room made me smile.

I looked left and right at our team and nodded. Five minutes later, we were the only living things in the room and no alarm had been raised.

The army had been kind to me. It had augmented my entire body and gave me special abilities. I’d seen parts of the world I’d always wanted to see. And the memory wipes meant I never had any lasting psychological damage from the horrors I inflicted on people or war crimes I witnessed. It was a pretty sweet deal. Plus no interrogation could work on what I couldn’t remember.

We put the looper into the computer system and the encrypted signal seamlessly slotted in, continuing to let our target that everything was okay on this end. All intel correct. All systems green.

I pushed the squirt on my arm to tell beta team that we were a go. Then everything went black.

…

I wake up in the barracks. It’s a beautiful day outside. I check the calendar. I’m missing six days. I hope the operation went well. The news is saying that the nuclear standoff is over. I hope I had something to do with it.




tags

He cracked as he moved, sounding like a fireplace. Popping softly, brittle matches stuffed into every joint. Each step brought him closer to me. I was handcuffed to the radiator. I didn’t know where I was or how such a frail old man had the strength to capture me like this. The room was old and looked abandoned. Piles of newspapers gathered in the corners, rustling with mice. One of my eyes was swollen shut and the other one was blurry. I looked up at the old man as he came closer. He held a tray of tea which he placed just out of my reach and sat down with painful, slow effort.

“Hello Jeremy” he sighed. “Do I look familiar?”

I’d been testing the strength of the handcuffs. Either my enhanced strength wasn’t working or the radiator’s mooring was reinforced. I looked at him with my good eye and snarled, trying to give him the sense of a dangerous animal.

He laughed. “Oh, very good, Jeremy. Very good.”

I was worried that he kept calling me Jeremy. That wasn’t my name. Mentally I reached for my name and found nothing.

A shot of panic rustled through me when I realized that most of my memory was a void.

“Yes, yes, by now you’re realizing that you’re not altogether altogether, are you? You’re here but you’re not really here, eh?” He laughed softly. “Yes, well, that sort of combat will do it to you. Tea?”

I lashed out with my foot at the old man’s tea set but came up short. Something gave way in my shoulder and I shrieked with pain like an animal. I immediately felt embarrassed at crying out.

“Jeremy, Jeremy, listen. Look. You almost spilled the tea there. It’s going to take weeks for your memory to come back. All you need to know right now is that I’m your friend. We’ve trained you and sent you out into combat and now you’re back. No one will find you here.”

I glared at him. I was more scared than before but I found the sound of his voice comforting. My instincts were all I had right now. I didn’t trust him but I did think that he was an ally. I’d never been in a situation like this before.

He stood to leave with the sound of toothpicks being broken, muffled popcorn, and twisting celery.

“I was like you, Jeremy. And you’ll get through this.” He nudged the tea closer. “You better drink this before it gets cold.”

He walked towards the door. Just before he left, he turned back to me.

“We won, you know. We won because of you. No one’ll ever know but I wanted to tell you that.”

He shuffled off down the hall until I couldn’t see him anymore.

I stared at the tea, debating whether to drink any.




tags

A belt without a buckle is a whip. The black holes she keeps buried in the garden of memory come from the wrong side of the tracks that go up and down the insides of her elbows that she hinges closed, putting up her fists to show that she knows how to fight. Not that I ever asked.

Each nest of discovered rats peeling out of newspapers from thirty years ago is one step closer to reacting to sudden movements like a normal person. Each hurdle you drag yourself under is a way to welcome the light. Become a soup can. Become a violin solo. Eventually, become lightning. Forget about the can and the can’ts of this world. It’s ALL can’ts. All you have to do is defeat them, from the smallest to the largest.

Most of us are asleep in front of slot machines. Credit cards around our necks and it’s getting late. The noose of each moment drawing lazy circles tighter and smaller around our plans. There’s a song to churn butter to that only the housewives of small towns in a small part of a small Eastern European county know how to sing. It’s their passport into each other’s homes when they meet another woman for the first time. It’s taught to the young women and it’s kept a secret from the men.

Be that song. See it in other people’s eyes. Everyone is not the same.



tags

I’m a psychic.

My aunt saw the ability and trained me when I was younger. My parents thought I was crazy but my aunt knew what ran in the family.

She taught me that most people have a box inside them where they keep their most precious memory. She taught me how to dig it out.

Surrounding myself with the most pleasant memories that every person had was one of the only ways I could keep myself sane while walking around in the crush of the general populace. I rarely left the house.

My aunt was called Trushka. We were descended from Eastern Europe. Not very many records existed of our nomadic family. We had been gypsies for generations. The circuses that had travelled Europe for centuries always had a Seer. A Reader. A Medium. A Bridge. One of our family.

Always a girl (except for Panthos in 1410 but that’s a tragic tale unto itself) and in this generation, it was me. Except this was Ohio and America was dead inside.

My parents had turned their back on the old ways. They were investment bankers on the property ladder. Ghosts, curses, changelings, fairies, mind-reading; all these were fairy tales from a primitive culture.

They were going to have me committed. They had tears in their eyes. They were happy to let my aunt take me in as a last-ditch effort. That effort turned into a permanent situation. I lost touch with them.

I lived with Trushka until her death twelve years later. By that time, I’d matured into a 24-year old young woman. Reclusive but gifted with the strong figure of my hard-working lineage. I was tall and shy.

When my aunt died, I needed to pay rent on the house she’d left to me. I got a job in the library.

Like I said, I’d been taught to cloak myself in people’s nicest and most cherished memories to keep myself sane during working hours around people.

It was always the same. Wedding. Wedding. Wedding. Honeymoon. Honeymoon. Honeymoon. Wedding. Wedding. Honeymoon. Second date. That one glorious moment from a current or past relationship, glittering on a string deep in the chasm of everyone’s heart.

Most of the time.

I remember the first time I got a picture of a room of dead people. Blood splashed on the walls. A sense of euphoria and honest love. Two little girls and a woman. A man tied up in the corner that had been forced to watch but was now dead as well.

I saw him. Over there in the cooking section. The man with the glasses. Impossible to tell how long ago this memory was from but it was his happy place.

It happens rarely but when it does, I don’t know what to do about it.




tags

It was a beautiful day for a ship launch.

These are the things I remember.

I remember the sun shining down out of a blue sky that arced from horizon to horizon with only a scattering of clouds above the water miles out from the beach.

I was perched on the small hill about a mile away from the launch site with my mother. Her bright red hair was still full and lustrous but shot through with grey. She’d say to me that every grey hair was from a time I fell and hurt myself. That’s how much she loved me.

I remember her bringing her hand above her eyes in a salute to shield her eyes from the sun. She was perched sidesaddle on her hip in a red dress. She’d tucked her heels up underneath her and was leaning on her other arm. Her hair was teased by the wind. When I remember her, this is the image that comes up the most, her leaning like a hood ornament into the breeze. As an adult, I can look at this memory objectively and see her not only as my mother, but as a woman. I can see how attractive she must have been.

She squinted, bringing a half-smile to her face.

In my memory, she looks out across towards the massive ship.

The ship was white with scooped shapes. It didn’t look aerodynamic but my mom told me that it wasn’t that kind of ship. It was a ‘long-range’ ship which meant that the science was different. It didn’t need to worry about drag and other wind-tunnel qualifications. It would ‘slip’ up and out from this plane of existence and then come back to this dimension at its destination. It would do the same to come back. It wouldn’t take as long as the other way, she said. He’d be back soon.

When I asked her when daddy would be back, she just looked away from me, back up at the ship. I could see love there, but also a little resentment. My father, the astronaut, was going on this trip against my mother’s wishes. I’d heard them fighting at night when they thought I was asleep.

We sat there on our red-checkered blanket having a picnic at the launch. We were there with thousands of other people. Red-necked sightseers, teenage couples, scientists, keen students, and the families of the other sixty astronauts.

We all sat there on blankets with picnics, the men with beers, ready to see the launch take place.

The numbers rang out from the loudspeakers in the distance.

Ten. Nine.

The little radios that we all had shouted out the numbers as well, a half second before the sound from the launch pad got to us. It made an echo of the numbers. I remember feeling like I was in a dream.

Four. Three.

My mother’s hand tightened on mine. I leaned up against her. I was eleven, old enough to be embarrassed by affectionate gestures from my parents but not old enough to do without them. I held onto her and we both watched the ship that held my father and her husband.

Two. One.

There was a clap of thunder and a ripple of imploding wind and the ship was gone. Arcing up from the launch pad was a copy of the ship fading slowly as it rose. It became transparent like a bad special effect as it got smaller until it disappeared completely.

That was sixty years ago. Their calculations were off. The ship came back this morning.

To everyone on the ship, they’d been gone for two months.

They were being briefed. My father was being told that my mother had died twenty years ago, ten years before my own wife. He was being told that I was in a wheelchair and that I had six grandkids.

I was about to meet my father as an old man. He was still thirty-six. I was looking forward to it.



tags

“I mean, what I’m saying is,” he said, “is that going skinny dipping never killed anyone.”

Her eyes trembled back for a second and her look softened to a vacancy that let him know that she was accessing.

“Brandy Guerrera and Jorge Garcia were killed in 1956 by their own village for skinny-dipping.” She replied. “It was seen an indecent behaviour for an unmarried couple. Patricia and William Lingham went skinny dipping in December in Ulert, Poland in 2002. They succumbed to hypothermia. There are twenty such incidents on file and 48 more hits unexplored on the subject.”

She took the fun out of everything.

Every open-ended argument about what the capital of Zaire was, or what actor starred in that action film ten years ago, or how the words to that song were sung was suddenly a five-second conversation that ended correctly and abruptly. The two of them concerned themselves mostly with activities that didn't need talking.

His friends teased him about going out with a girl with implants. They said that she was obviously slumming it by going out with a kid too poor to afford brainwork. He told them all politely to get fucked. He was in love with her.

The implants were trying his patience, though. He realized that the inadequacies of his own memory and lack of connection to the network were basically the reasons that he had conversations at all.

The only things that she wanted to speak about were the unknowable answers to age-old questions like “what is life?” and “which religion is best?” and even then she had volumes of theories to draw upon.

They had a lot of sex together which was pretty mind-blowing considering all the tantric volumes that she studied and downloaded but afterwards, he got the feeling that while she knew, well, everything, she really didn’t have a personal opinion on anything.

When he asked her how she felt about something, she’d get a confused look on her face and he could see from the pause and the sudden divot between her eyebrows that it took her a lot of effort to frame an answer. In a way, she was even more naïve and simple than he was.

That’s why he loved her and that was the reason why she loved him, he thought. He could challenge her in ways that her implant-ridden, philosophy-obsessed pals uptown could not.

He was wrong, of course, but it was a fantastic summer for both of them.




tags

Ms. Jerryson had a brace on her leg. One foot clanked.

She was old. Looking back, she was probably only about forty-something but to us children, she was ancient. Her age held power and fear.

English was the subject that she taught. Her thin skin dissolved into fissured wrinkles around her eyes, close to her ears, and under her chin but the front of her face was nearly wrinkle-free. It added to her terrifying allure.

Her body was a thick rectangle of utilitarian muscle and fat corners. She looked like a python digesting the edges off of a refrigerator.

Her white hair could not be tamed. It was hair that would have made Einstein jealous. On Mondays, she’d have it tied back and over the week it would rebel. It was like she’d get herself together on the weekend, marshal her faculties along with her hairdo, and march in every Monday anew before life and her students would grind her down.

Rumour had it that her hair used to be as red as fire and would catch the sun to blind you.

She was never beautiful.

She was my favourite teacher.

Blind in one eye, gaps in the smile, and words to paint a house with. To listen to her speak was to hear the most famous of orators. Everyone has paled in comparison.

Ms. Jerryson held us in thrall. She fascinated us. A scolding from her left a person permanently mentally scarred. She was entertaining and harsh.

I never heard of her death. I would not be surprised in the slightest if she was still teaching.



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