The hills rise up out of the plain like soft rumpled blankets thrown over a romping puppy. They are rounded, gentle, convoluted and complex. The dark sultry crevices that branch out into the intimate interior of the landscape hide rivulets of water, streams, pools, humid pockets of hidden space where the stones of the earth were almost obscenely moist and exposed. Those little valleys can seem endless, a fractal boundary of infinite length between forest and home.
Monthly Archives March 2010
46 – Story of a Small Stone
It is the fate of small stones, so it is said, to be ground away into dust by the actions of life and the cruel mechanics of the world. It is true of most, in fact, though a few undergo the opposite transformation, accreting layers of mass in the warm wet interior of a kidney, or the cool wet of an oyster. Some, in the vacuum of space, gather into planets.
45 – The Second Coming of the Antichrist
I grew up in the same town as Jacob, went to the same school and became friends with him at some point, though I couldn’t say when exactly. He was always just kind of there, a charismatic troublemaker a lot of us fell into the orbit of. He didn’t tell me he was the Antichrist until high school, on the occasion of the senior prom to which he had invited two different girls, and by then I simply took it in stride as the sort of thing Jacob would say.
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44 – Guilt
“Kick the left posterior superior temporal sulcus again.”
“Nothing, Steve, I think it may be burnt out.”
“It can’t be completely trashed, he was at work just yesterday, I swear he felt guilty about not getting that javascript done.”
“Look, the guilt centers just aren’t responding to shocks any more. I put a hot clothes hanger wire into the medial prefrontal cortex the other day, and all I got was a twitch.”
“We’ve got to do something, the last couple of stories, when he’s managed to post, have been crap. The guilt complex is the only thing we’ve got to work with now that the adrenal gland has shriveled up like a raisin.”
“I know, I know. You can only run so much guilt and self loathing through a brain before it loses it’s ability to respond, though. Maybe we could make him sick again? That fever a few weeks ago kept him in bed for days.”
“Yeah, but how much writing did he get done?”
“Point. Anything going on in the ambition centers?”
“Sleep.”
“What?”
“Sleep. Ambition centers are stuck on sleep, have been for a while.”
“Damn. Steve, I hate to say it, but I don’t think we have much choice, he’s running out of time tonight.”
“Well, push the guilt program, maybe he’ll get something done this weekend. If nothing else we’ll suck all the energy out of the system and make sure he doesn’t do anything else.”
“I just hope he appreciates what we’re doing for him.”