They say that when NASA’s head of exobiology research read the first message, he fainted. They say that when he was revived, he picked up the paper on which the message was printed, read it through once, and fainted again. Whether Anderson Wiley actually fainted, the story became symbolic of the beginning of a new era. This was Mankind’s first contact with intelligent creatures from another star, and nothing would ever be the same again.
Category Archives: Prose
06 – The Wind
It was the sound of the wind that got me in the end. It blows over the abandoned houses and around the dead still cars that litter the highways, and listening to it is like voyeurism. It’s a kind of intimacy, the sound of wind flowing over the vacant works of man, as if this is what nature only does when no one is around to see.
05 – The Goats
Our purpose was to bring upon the earth a superior species of flying spider goat. It is easy to criticize with the advantage of hindsight what seemed at the time a faultless, if idealistic, goal – but I think if you examine honestly the problems that ensued, you will find that none could reasonably have been predicted, let alone prevented. The sad truth is that the flying spider goat was an inevitable development, and the consequences of that development correspondingly unavoidable.
04 – Another 100 Words
They grew on the bones of the dead, and it was an embarrassment of riches. The star poisons were only stimulants to the fungus, which swelled in the radioactive breeze. Each phosphorescent pustule reflected the light of a neighbor in the gloom beneath impenetrable caustic skies, until the glow of one pulsed in synchrony with another, another, another. Generations grew and flashed and surrendered to the acidic mire. Patterns of light became a tessellated map of thought, and a mind awoke in the gloom. Oh, such paradise have I been born into, it thought, God does truly love his creation.
[ratings]
Another 100 Words by Kenneth Lett is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
03 – Cat and Chicken
Frank watched the little swirl of light with a sinking sense of his own mortality. The cat watched it too, and Frank hoped that it felt as miserable as he did. He had never liked cats, but this one seemed to relish its role in his humiliation. No, if it felt anything at all behind those lazy green eyes, it was probably plain malice. In any case the cats seemed to see nothing interesting in the little ball of magic. Or couldn’t see it, he couldn’t remember if cats could see the thaumic spectrum or not.
Director’s Cut: 01 – I Woke Up on Wednesday
When I awoke, head still heavy with sleep and eyes glued shut with congealed sleep, it took me some time to figure out what was wrong.
Well, there was no alarm, that was one thing. Not being a morning person, waking up to silence usually indicates that I’ve long overslept and the clock radio has given up its futile task.
No, something else. Not just that I was uncomfortable, either, lying on my back with arms to my sides in that peaceful pose that only corpses can be put into for any length of time without cramping.
I began to roll over, drifting back beneath the surface again, sleep a warm sea welcoming me home. Mid-roll, my forehead came into sharp contact with something cold and hard, and the delicious warmth of unconsciousness was jerked away from me to the accompaniment of a multitude of very wrong sensations. Firstly, cold hard pain in the forehead, but also something had wrapped itself around my arm and was pulling at me painfully. Blankets were twisted strangely around my legs, and there was the distinct and disconcerting smell of cucumbers. For a moment I hung in that twilight space between dream and awake, where you are not quite sure if things are real or not. I saw strange images, some other room, some bed not my own, blinking lights, strange blankets, plaid pillows.
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01 – Fangirl
Skiffy Khan is not very big, as science fiction cons go, but it’s ours. I include myself in that “ours” because not only did I live in Franklin, where the Khan had been held for the last eight years, and not only had I attended since its inception, but I had finally become an official part of it. Local author, small book of short stories published by an actual publisher of paper books, panelist on three separate panels, and manning my very own table stacked with trade paperback copies of “The Life of Mind”, my modest contribution to the world of Arts and Letters. As the single published local author, I was Khan royalty.
48 – April First
The creature looked very much like a wasp, very insectile, articulated, inscrutable. Very buzzy. It tilted its head down in a way that should have been quite awkward, but was instead perfectly smooth and mechanically precise. Well, you get this sort of thing with aliens, the unnerving bodily movements, the strange smells, the general… well, alien-ness of them. It looked down at me, and amid the low polyphonic buzzing noises, a voice came, though honestly I never figured out if that voice came from some translation device or was crafted from a superposition of thousands of different pitches of buzz. Frankly, it got annoying sometimes, the buzzing.
47 – Cave
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.
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.”
42 – Doctor Hawthorn and the Imps
The affair began during his careful illustration of Erynnis tages tages, which he had pinned with meticulous care to a block of cork, wings spread wide to show the intricate patterns that appeared a mere muddled grey-brown from any distance. From his perspective, hunched over the stricken insect, eyes flicking back and forth between paper and butterfly, its patterns were dense and deep, and in this peaceful meditative study he felt as if he were flying over an exotic landscape of complex illuminations as far removed from his true reality as the surface of any distant planet.
The pins that held the butterfly open to his inspection were long and thin, particular to the lepidopterist’s practice, and an item he took some pride in. They were the only purchase he had allowed himself that was unique to this and only this pursuit, the only item not merely borrowed from the normal daily life at the manor house. He kept them in a small tin box where, he thought, they would not be mistaken by Mrs. Burnside for ordinary pins. On the few occasions on which he had found the shiny precision instruments holding up the hem of the drapes or suturing closed some new wound on the sleeve of his collecting jacket, he had retrieved from Mrs Burnside’s sewing basket several ordinary pins and had carefully replaced each of the mis-used scientific pins in situ, and had then put his own pins back in their tin box. He felt that with time, Mrs. Burnside would become cognizant of the distinction and he would no longer feel compelled to keep the pins in a variety of seldom used desk or cupboard drawers, pushed to the very back and if possible discretely covered in an old paper or two.
41 – Irreproduceable
It seemed to be made of glass, though Harry assured me almost fervently that it wasn’t. I could see that it wasn’t, didn’t imagine it would be, I had just commented on the appearance – but Harry was oblivious, too habitually jovial to ever really notice his own condescension. I tuned him out and looked at the piece, the depth and sheen of it changing as I looked. I couldn’t seem to find the same perspective twice, it always looked as if it had been turned ever so slightly away from the orientation you saw a moment ago. It made my eyes water.
Harry seemed unusually thrilled with it, or with something. Of course he got paid either way, and for that matter so did I, but to him the prospect of a unique object was exciting, a grand discovery. To me, it would be a defeat, which is why it was not going to happen, Harry’s good mood be damned.
40 – Over the Hill
I never got used to Dad’s face once the treatments began, but in a way I got used to the fact of his face, the idea that every time I saw him, it changed. It felt far more like a personal regression than the advancement of his own transformation – his face growing younger made me feel younger in return, always looking into the eyes of a father that had only existed in memories of decades past.
39 – In the Dark
In the infinite dark of a hollow space deep within a cold dead nickle-iron asteroid long divorced from the sun that had once held it in thrall, lived a Mind. In the darkness it thought about the universe into which it had been born, of the ancient times when it had walked free on the surface of a world teeming with life. It thought of the wars and plagues that had taken away, bit by bit, that embarrassment of riches. It thought of the millenia of struggling desperation, the migrations, the sorrows, the collapse. It did not think itself lucky to have survived.
As long as the universe outside the cold metal shell held some trace of heat, it would remain. As long as it remained, it would remember.
It was the last dying thought of a race long gone, it contained everything they had known, everything they had considered, observed, imagined. All their works recorded, all their thoughts set in eternal motion. In the darkness, it remembered, remembered the very birth of life and its long and painful end. It mourned, and knew mourning in exquisite detail.
It knew as well what had gone wrong. Too late now, but in dying the answers were laid bare. Perhaps in those final moments every creature understands the flaws of its life, or perhaps only the accursed few are given the insight of ending. The Mind knew the mistakes that had been made, knew how it could all have been repaired, what path could have led them all out of the darkness. It was only in the ending, the passage into death, that the circle could be completed. Having taken into itself everything that they were, and having watched them pass, it knew how they they could have been saved.
It was a shock then, to find the darkness penetrated by a brilliant light. The news came to it in words and images and emotions: they lived yet, and hungered for the solutions it had seen in their ashes. Come to us, they said, you have seen our end, now tell us how to live.
In the Dark by Kenneth Lett is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
38 – Glitter
“If you can’t get laid, get a laugh.”
She said with a smile that somehow just avoided humiliating me. Had she been trying to? We both looked around, the room was a glimmering star field, dark and somber furniture transformed by the slowly settling cloud of glitter.
“It will clean up,” she concluded.
“No it won’t, it’s glitter. Glitter never goes away, it’s the herpes of craft supplies. Look, I’m sorry -”
“Don’t be, really.”
She smiled again, it was disarming almost to the point of emasculation. She was a big woman. Which is not to say overweight, but she was built on an industrial scale, just a little to large and a little to perfect to seem real. A small curvy woman magnified, as if I was merely standing too close, or looking at her through a lens. She was taller than I, and her hand, when she held it out to me, looked oversized and strong. It enveloped my own in a soft warm implacability, a friendly but immovable grip. Her nails were elegantly shaped, painted subtle red.
“I accept,” she said.
I looked at her eyes, and realized I hadn’t, not really, before now. The smile was reflected in them like the sun in a lake, but there was more there, something intent, nervous.
“You’re sure?”
Her eyes sought something in my face, they peered out from behind the veil of her looming good humor, as if they might like to duck away behind the smile again. I felt kinship to them, they and I would both hide away and look out from the shadows, but were driven to exposure by the sense of possibility that now seemed to pervade the sparkling room.
I felt my fingers dig into her hand and realized they were no longer hanging there dormant in her warm grip, but holding onto her, seeking to draw from her hand something that matched the subtle vulnerability in her eyes.
“Ok,” I said, “lets do this thing.” Like falling, like I had been hanging by my fingertips for so long I didn’t even know it until I let go, I smiled back at her.
Glitter by Kenneth Lett is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
37 – The Hero of Mice and his Sword
Once upon a time a mouse found an enchanted sword. It was small and fit his little paws perfectly. He took the sword and used it to defend himself and other mice from their enemies, from cats and owls and dogs and snakes. He slew a great tomcat, and became the most famous mouse of all time. He was the first hero he mice had ever had, but when they spoke of him, they always spoke of the sword as well.
‘Oh, the Hero and his amazing Sword’, they would say, or ‘Thank the great God that the Sword came to our Hero’. The hero himself began to think very ill of this. He grew angry that the credit for his feats was shared with the sword, as if his own bravery and cunning were only a minor part of his own accomplishments.
One day he took the sword and thrust it deep into a cobblestone of flint. “I am done with the sword, for a hero needs nothing but his own bravery and intelligence,” he proclaimed.
He strode away from the crowd of stunned mice and found the largest of the feral dogs that plagued the mouse community, and he slew it with a toothpick. He climbed into the high trees where the owls nested, and he drove them out of the forest one by one. He sought the snakes in their underground tunnels, and tied them into knots.
When he returned from his quest, the other mice seemed enthralled by something going on in the clearing. A handsome young mouse had wrapped his paws around the handle of the enchanted sword and was heaving mightily at it, trying to release it from the heavy stone. As the hero approached, the young mouse pulled the sword free and held it above his head in triumph.
The hero watched as all the mice cheered the new young hero, and then we walked quietly out of the clearing.
The Hero of Mice, and his Sword by Kenneth Lett is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Way to start the new year (36?)
I flew home for the Christmas holiday, and returned on the 28th, back to work the 29th, and after working, moved the heavy stuff (anvils included) from the old shop to the even older shop (in the snow). Work again the 30th, then off to Portland, cleaning, cooking, aquarium setup, bank errands. The one thing I don’t seem to have actually done in the last week is write a story. Great start to the new year, eh? So this is it, the story about why I didn’t write a story.
Apologies to all, and a really very nearly decent story next week. Promise.
Oh, and happy new year.
35 – Twas the Night Before
The soot poured out in clouds, inky black billows that cast surreal shadows on the pristine white carpet before settling from the air to make those shadows a permanent feature. Heavy back boots settled down onto the fire, revealing unreasonably clean red pant legs above. I would have sworn no human body could fit into that chimney, and even if i were wrong about that, no rational explanation exists for the complete lack of soot on the man’s bright red suit, the failure of a large cheerful fire to burn of singe it.
He bent down to step out of the fireplace, bent far too low, stepped out of a space that wasn’t sufficient to hold him in the first place. Space became putty around him, size and shape suddenly fluid concepts, flexible restraints on the reality around him. He was a big man, but not slow, not awkward. His smooth animal grace was frightening, unreal. We cowered behind the couch, our eyes peeking over the back frozen in incredulous terror.
He, perhaps It, stepped lightly across the room to the tree. The strange star atop it illuminated the massive costumed figure but seemed to leave the rest of the room in darkness. The big man seemed to acknowledge the pulsing ethereal light briefly before placing two wrapped packages gently on the floor, and it seemed to me the acknowledgment was mutual.
It was the star we had found in the crowded and musty old second-hand store we had wandered into in the fall, and had never been able to locate on subsequent trips into town. I remembered thinking it beautiful but oddly discomfiting, Steven had insisted on bringing it home. In its blue-violet glow, was had sat before the tree and talk to each other of our wishes.
That was last night. Tonight, on the eve of Christmas, the last thing we had expected was for those wishes to be granted, and certainly not by Santa Claus himself. The specter before us was undeniable, though, the beautifuly wrapped boxes on the floor had the size and the dreamlike certainty about them that convinced me they contained precisely what Steven and I had said we wanted.
Then, as the impossible figure crossed the floor to the fireplace, he turned. The face that peered directly at our hidden face was the archetype of jolly, the very essence of cheer and robust good humor. He put a finger to the side of his large nose. His eyes were black voids, dark like the space between stars, threatening to suck us in.
He bent down and stepped into the fire, oblivious of the flames and the very impossibility of the act, and then he was gone. Soot black footprints marked his path back and forth across the room, stark black impossibilities on white carpet that glowed in the light of a gently pulsing star.