skonen_blades

These five little girls
Hovering around ten years old
One of them is my daughter
They’re laughing their uninhibited heads off in the sun
Exploding and sprinting
Screaming and playing
Glittering like minnows in the shallows
Each one unique
Hair flouncing, whipping, streaming
They’ve grown up together
Neighbours and pals
Nuclear reactors of life
Shining pre-chrysalis
Puberty just about to tear through their ranks like wildfire
The next ten years are a battlefield and there’s no avoiding it
Time’s steamroller can’t be resisted
That cliff is coming up quickly
That cusp is about to be crowned
Who knows what they’ll be like later
As veterans of adolescence
After the werewolf transformation
The time lapse of hair and stretch marks and hormones
Their brains sizzling into a frenzy
After society’s drooling eyes look at them differently
And the real hammer blows of life start to fall
The rodeo gets well and truly underway
When they become hopeless aliens
Collecting secrets, shame, and loneliness
And all adults become incomprehensibly, cluelessly dense overnight
Before simmering back into actual people years later
After the storm passes

Will these five even be friends then?
In that aftermath?
For now, they pour joy into the world
Angelic in the amber of my memory
Laughing on the front lawn in an eternal summer



tags

And there he is in the dark
Hands shivering
Breath rapid
You tapped into him from afar
A harpoon sent in the night
Awakening something in the deep
Boiling his sumberged virility
Into a tipping point of steam
A continent of unrealized fantasies
Lust behind a dam
All his restrained sensuality thrashing
Imprisoned adolescence in his depths
A drowned youth that hasn't seen the sunlight in a long time
Living off the bare mininum
And under pressure
Learning to see in the dark for years
And he shudders
In time with the bars on his cage
His hunger in the fathoms
That can no longer be seen from the surface
Then you
shooting-star down from the dark sky
Between the waves
Splashing through
Torpedo arrowing
Down to light the abandoned trenches
And his open mouth
Fishing like a God
Hooking deep
And pulling hard
And he likes the pain
Because it's a sign of life



tags

Dr. Ian Montrose of the Illinois delegation was the first to discover time travel. Originally, he had wanted to be a plastic surgeon. Physics, quantum physics, and the theories of time travel came more naturally to him, however, so that was the path he pursued.

He found that while he couldn’t actually send people back in time, he could vibrate their atoms in such a way that the years would fall away in a causality transaction that he claimed he didn’t entirely understand.

His machine made people younger.

When an older person was put into the chair, he or she could desire the amount of years that needed to be removed. With a quick flourish of the wrist, a lever was thrown, sparks flew, and instantly, the patient sat up quickly, gasping with fresh lungs and wide eyes that no longer needed glasses.

It was quick, expensive, and best of all, a person could come back in 80 years and do it again. Repeat business. To say that Dr. Montrose made money would be an understatement. He changed society.

For someone so smart, he was pretty stupid. The scandals that happened afterwards were attributed to his ignorance but it’s hard to believe that someone so intelligent had no idea about the horrific side effects that were happening in one specific alternate universe.

Those years weren’t just disappearing from the patients. They were being ‘swapped’. Alternate versions of themselves in the universe that became known as Earth02 suddenly found themselves aged 60 or 70 years instantly.

While eating breakfast in the morning, spoon halfway to their lips, liver spots would bloom on the backs of their hands, frailty would rush through them with a shuddering wave, and they’d gasp as the room became blurry. Young women on busses would scream as their hair suddenly whitened, as their legs withered, as their bones became brittle and their skin wrinkled.

In the middle of a fishing trip, a youth became forty years older than his own father right there in the rowboat while they both screamed. In footage that chilled people around the world of Earth 02, a seventeen year old fashion model in Milan fell on the catwalk, crumpling down, teeth falling out of her mouth, bones jutting out beneath dry skin, before osteoporosis broke her hip, her legs, her shoulder, and three ribs on the catwalk.

It was like time lapse film. You have to imagine the terror. It seemed to have no rhyme or reason to it. It seemed to be completely random. Earth02 had no idea why or how it was happening. It mostly seemed to happen to the young, affecting those between the ages of 18 to 24 most of all, making it all the more tragic.

The scientists on Earth02 worked hard, finding a trail of superstring atoms back to our Earth. Ironically, it was Dr. Ian Montrose of Earth02 that was the key to finding us. He worked hard and eventually found a way to cross over entirely from one dimension to another. That footage of the two doctors meeting for the first time is legendary. Our Montrose, blue-eyed with slightly darker hair facing down the Montrose of Earth02, blonde hair cut short above dark green eyes.

Once it all became clear, our Montrose was tried for crimes against humanity. He was found innocent but it was the trial of the century. The technology of the two planets was exchanged. The victims of Earth 02 stole their years back. The younger people that had been part of the Montrose treatments on Earth01 were hunted down in a bloody chapter of history. To stop the raids, the two planets agreed to pay out money to the victims of Earth 02.

For a while, the technology was seized and banned. Life returned to a tense form of normalcy. Research, however, continued. It was the possible fountain of youth. That kind of lure couldn’t be resisted.

Then we found the problem. Montrose had dialed the frequency of his time-stealer to that one specific dimension. There were theoretically an infinite number to choose from.

Dollar signs and evil thoughts filled minds.

If the time-stealer was dialed to a random universe each time, we’d theoretically only steal life from one person in one alternate universe. That didn’t seem like such a big deal. Plus, it would most likely go unnoticed. It would be a strange report in that Earth’s equivalent of the Weekly World News and that would be it. If they noticed at all, it would be a scientific footnote at best. As long as there was only one, they’d never track it back to us.

Game on. The technology was ‘fixed’ and brought back online. For those that can afford it, people of both EarthPrime and Earth02 are now in the peak of health eternally. De-aging treatments are expensive, millions of dollars for each year removed. Black market time chairs are set up in South American alleys from time to time, reverting hundreds before police trace the power spike and shut them down. We’re partying.

The time chairs exist, stealing lives from other universes.




tags

Half of memory is made of humidity, temperature, and smell.

The hot wall of damp air blankets my shock as I step off the train. Ten years disappear with the cluck of a hen. Here I am, shirt already sticking to my skin, and the feeling of being here rises to fill me again like a déjà vu videotape that was only ever set to pause.

It makes a gift of the present. I moved away from here a decade ago. I was twenty-two when I left. I spent my last years of being a teenager in this place. I remember the parties, the markets, the nights with strangers, the stink of the alien food that became familiar, the social cues that became part of my language after local friendships formed.

I felt like a thread being sewn into a blanket. There’s a lack of isolation here. Everyone’s a cousin.

I’ve been away in the white world for so long that the constant press of flesh in the crowded train station is annoying again instead of comforting.

It makes me think that Youth is a city. A consequence-free environment that was never free of consequences. A viewpoint that is mutually agreed upon with other people your own age. Bodies that don’t care that they have to work at six in the morning because they can stay up until three and they’ll only be a little groggy for the day of work. If they have a job. Having a good time is secondary to having money and having fun is only something to do in between bouts of athletic sex and drug use.

A hot city with no traffic laws and only a semblance of a municipal government. Chaos in clusters. Each day had a new ending.

When I moved away from this humid place back to mainland Europe, I grew up. I got my stuff together and organized my goals into acceptable, achievable chunks. Frivolity came to me in fits. Every two weekends, a party would show up and make me laugh for a while and then, like a submarine, I’d go back under and resume work on The Plan. Long winter nights cooled my need for fun.

But now, this body that I’ve come to think of as old is drinking in the stink of the marketplace; the blood of the meat and the steam from the soups. I can feel new life fizzing through my veins like a nitrogen lesson, ascending too fast from a deep-sea dive. I want to kiss the first person that comes close to me. Like I used to. Of course, I don’t.

I’ve become a subservient, helpful person now. I’ve become a person that is part of a gentle tribe on par with librarians and missionaries. I’m a scholar, socially awkward at the best of times, listening to colleagues express their structured views. I’m come to believe in The Word as a primary means of communication. I’ve forgotten how to listen to The Animal. I’ve forgotten to trust the instincts that pace within me, leashed and mangy and pretending to be tame.

I’m supposed to be here for two weeks to see an old friend. I consider tearing up my return ticket right then and there and never going back to Europe. I also consider turning around and getting back to my seat right away, not even letting my luggage leave the train, and buying a return ticket immediately.

I settle for a compromise and start walking forward.




tags