Great Writers -- R
R. A. Daunton is an award-winning screenwriter, novelist, and musician with an MA in Screenwriting from Napier University in Edinburgh and a BA in Film from The University of Kent. He has numerous published published stories, and two of his shirt films are currently doing the rounds on the festival circuit and can be viewed at various festivals both around the world and online.
The Forty Winks of the Narcoleper
Part One
She was moving, yet she was still. Her body shimmered, glowing like nectar, amber and translucent. The woman’s mind was clear, empty of all woe, of all thought - save for the voice telling her that she was content. Her voice, her interior monologue. That was all there was, there in that state. Planets, moons, and stars passed her by. The warmth of a thousand suns brushed her face as she lay, still and untroubled. There were no worries out in the cosmos. She was there, floating, working on her intergalactic tan. The longer she stayed, the brighter she glowed. Her hue grew stronger with each passing sun. Her body speckled and popped as if aflame, reflecting the infernos she witnessed swallowing systems and engulfing worlds.
There was violence within the unknown, but it could not harm her, that she knew. She had seen planets come and go, shatter, and turn to dust; she had witnessed great empires grow, take to the stars, and crumble beneath her as if playing out within the blink of an eye. She had touched the faces of warlords and caressed the bodies of kings. She had whispered into the ears of dictators who ruled star systems so vast and ancient that her Earthly mind could scarcely comprehend them. They had been none the wiser, but she knew—deep down—that they felt her presence; they had heard her words. She was re-painting reality with her amber brush, one stroke at a time.
#
The black orb watched her from behind an azure moon. It felt new to her, that desolate place. A blank, black canvas devoid of stars, of planets. There was nothing there but a moon, blue and sullen—no sun left to warm her nectar skin. For once, lost and alone—and for the first time that she could remember—she was cold.
She drew closer to the moon. It floated within the centre of nothing and made her body feel harsh. The feeling was sharp and uncomfortable, chilling her. The bright glow of her body drew weaker as she came to the freezing planetoid. Her breath stifled within her throat. Her digits tingled, then throbbed. She could feel her amber begin to crack and splinter.
The moon appeared to glare back at her as she reached out, her face a shifting, twisting mass of confusion. She had to know what was happening; she had to know why.
The orb rose from its place behind the moon. The thing was an abyssal shade of empty black. As it appeared to the woman, a sense of hopelessness washed over her, as if nothing she had done, seen, experienced, or hoped for had ever held meaning. Inky globules dribbled from the body of the orb, bubbling and popping. They were fathomless in their bleakness, devoid of sense or purpose, swirling as they spat out of the orb’s mass. They peppered the base of the moon, kissing it with their cracked and bleeding lips before evaporating into the ether. In their wake, they left spots upon the base of the planetoid. Black, empty holes with no discernible end, all but snuffing out its bright, azure glow. It made the woman want to cry, though she knew not why.
Even within the vacuum of space, she heard the sound. A harsh, ear-piercing scream emanated from somewhere inside the moon. It cried out as the darkness absorbed it, pleading to the woman, begging her for help. She looked on as the blue became black, the orb leering back at her, taunting her, daring her to act. Before everything became nothing, before the moon became orb, and the dark emptiness of space joined with the bleakness of its body—she saw it. From somewhere deep within the darkness: an eye. It winked at her, its pupil as black and devoid of meaning as the thing that held it. It was a bleak thing, lacking any hint of thought or sense. There was only purpose. A purpose that she had seen before, only within the most reprehensible of characters throughout the cosmos. To destroy. To consume. To conquer. Only this thing lacked the one common denominator that dwelled behind every eye, no matter how far past reasoning its bearer had fallen. No matter where she had been, no matter which galaxy she had found herself in—she had never seen an eye so lacking in life. There was no spark. No care. No humanity.
Her amber hue dissolved. Beside the eye, thirty-nine more opened. They, too, in turn, winked.
#
Lisa woke up in a cold sweat, with the sound of screaming ringing through her head. Confused and freezing, she rubbed her eyes and looked around the darkness.
As Lisa sat on the edge of her bed, the realisation that the screaming hadn’t stopped began to dawn on her. It wasn’t contained to her head. It was coming from outside.
Moving her shivering body across the bed, Lisa approached the window and pulled at the blinds. Metal and cool to the touch. She braced herself, ready to see what manner of being could be lurking outside, causing such a maelstrom of cacophonous, hideous noise.
She peeked through the blinds, being mindful not to reveal too much of herself to the outside world. The street outside was covered in a blanket of snow, shining to a gleaming hue that shimmered and sparkled, reflecting the stars from the infinite sky above. It was a breathtaking, beautiful sight, and it sent Lisa’s mind into overdrive. Fumbling with the blinds, she pushed them down, forgetting all cares of being seen. There was nothing but snow; no cars, no street signs, no buildings left uncovered. It was as if somebody had taken a brush to the entire world, painting it in a thick, white, glittering gloss.
Her eyes darted from one end of the street to the other. There were no signs of anything that could have produced the screams; no tracks, no disturbance at all. Yet still, they bellowed out through the haze. There was nothing but undisturbed, fresh snow. It cascaded from the heavens, growing thicker as she watched, threatening to turn the outside world into nothing but sparkling white.
Transfixed by the snowscape, Lisa felt herself melt into its embrace. Her head began to droop, and her eyelids became heavy. It was as if she could feel the snow calling to her, beckoning her forward into its dreamy fleece.
Her head connected with the window. With a sudden, jolting shock, she jumped backwards, pulling herself out of the creeping drowse. Snapping out of whatever strange entanglement had come over her, Lisa touched the centre of her forehead. The condensation was icy-cold, almost frost. It began to drip down her cheeks, chilling her—shocking her back to consciousness.
As Lisa rubbed the remnants of condensation over her neck and face, she heard it again. Furrowing her brow, she saw the first evidence that she was not going insane. Within the snow, where it had once been undisturbed, were footprints trailing from one end of the street to the other. The treads went on before disappearing into the blizzard, far out of sight. They were heavy and deep, pressed at least five inches into the snow. They went off in a line, straight as an arrow, as if whatever had made them was traveling with speed and purpose. As Lisa squinted, she could also make out several thin, circular holes behind each tread. Following closely behind the holes were splashes of bright, almost neon-coloured red blotches.
The woman racked her brain, attempting to discern what it was that she was seeing. Then, through the screams, it came. Softly at first, swimming gently through the harshness of sound. It drifted through the noise, dancing atop each peak in frequency before ducking back into the shadows. It lurked below the darkness, creeping slowly to the front of Lisa’s mind, hiding from consciousness behind the cover of screams. It became hypnotising; it intoxicated her as it grew in volume. It rose until it matched that of the screams before threatening to drown them out with its malignancy. The noise rang out through the empty streets and filled Lisa with a sense of calm that betrayed all reason. So filled with calm was Lisa that she did not notice the screams cease and the noise take over. The lappings of a strange and unknown alien tongue.
She did not know what she was hearing, but it filled her with a peace she had not thought possible. Inebriated by it, Lisa felt her body drift back to rest, and her eyelids grow heavy once more. It was as if the bizarre words filling her bedroom were a grim lullaby, beckoning her into the land of nod.
Lisa leaned back from the window, her eyes closed. She could feel herself falling. The world flew by, visions of speeding yellow lines flowing vertically through her mind as her body became weightless, and she felt herself drifting upwards, away from her physical shell.
She looked down at her empty, twitching body as it hung off the side of the bed. Her astral form was bright, translucent amber through which swam sparkling orbs of silver and bronze. She drew her hands towards her face and peered through them, down at her body below. She could tell that something was amiss. That feeling, those words… it all felt too familiar. The chattering became dampened and fuzzy. Without it in its purest form, she could begin to think straight. She knew where she was and what was going on.
Lisa took a final look around the bedroom before diving back into her body. With a twitch and a kick of her legs, she sprung back to life, gasping for breath. The chattering of tongues stopped instantaneously as she awoke. With a grin forming on her lips, Lisa knew that she had got one over on whatever it was toying with her. She felt herself infused with swagger, determined that she would not take this lying down. She would take the fight to whatever it was that caused this. Nothing would break Lisa Maroni from her slumber and live to tell the tale. She needed answers. She wanted revenge. She had explored every corner of the cosmos; she had flown upon the shoulders of supernovas. She had battled alongside alien warlords from one star system to another. Sleep was sacred to Lisa; it has taken her to places beyond imagination. To her, her bedroom was a holy place. It was a shrine to herself, forbidden to all but her.
#
Lisa rolled off the bed and moved through the darkness. Dirty laundry and art materials littered the ground. She walked on tip-toes, careful not to cover her feet in any wayward paint.
With a clack, a lamp burst to life and illuminated the mess. She shook her head, bent down, and picked some clothes up from the floor. She pulled a paint-encrusted t-shirt over herself, wriggled into a pair of black leggings, and fumbled her hands over the carpet in search of the cleanest paintbrush that she could find. Her fingers danced over discarded paint pots, socks, and discarded underwear until she found what she was looking for. Pulling her thick, black hair into a bun, she secured it in place with the paintbrush and made her way towards the edge of the room.
She passed an easel, still holding the canvas that she had been working on the previous evening. Bending down by the door, she picked up a pair of well-worn motorcycle boots and sighed. She was still groggy from being forced in and out of sleep; the boots were tight, and her sockless feet only added to the struggle as she heaved at their pulls.
‘One on. One more to go,’ Lisa muttered as the first boot popped into place, her body wobbling as she balanced on one leg.
She heaved against the wall as she pushed herself into the second boot, but it was no use. She had too many thoughts rushing through her head, and each one was doing its best to distract her from her task. Pulling her leg up, she kicked it back down, slamming her foot into place inside the boot. Lisa wobbled for a second, waving her arms to her sides in an attempt to steady herself. Losing her balance, she tumbled backwards towards the easel, her body spinning into a pirouette as her back hit the canvas.
Lisa fell to the floor as last night’s painting came careening down on top of her, followed by a shower of art materials. Dirty water and paint sprayed her face and her clothes. Brushes kissed her cheeks as they ran down her face, trailing lines of red and white in their wake.
She pushed the canvas off her body and looked down at the mess. As Lisa’s eyes met the canvas, the staccato strokes of marbled red and white paint stared back at her. The image that glanced back was like a stranger. There was no familiarity, nor was it recognisable as coming from her hand. A spike of panic shot through her as she realised what it was she was seeing. The canvas depicted a snowstorm, almost identical to the one outside her window.
She shook her head. She had no recognition of painting this. Last night, the world was as normal as any March evening could be, but there was no mistaking it; upon the canvas were the boot treads, the strange, thin holes, and the large swathes of bubbling, stuttered red blotches that followed them. Her artistic endeavours almost always featured bright, lurid pulp artwork: beautiful dames and hunky, masculine men with torn shirts and stern expressions. Even her more abstract attempts were never so visceral or photographic.
Lisa picked the painting up and drew it towards her face. She gagged as the smell of it hit her nostrils: the smell of sulphur and copper. The aroma was disgusting; it caused her eyes to water and her head to turn away in revulsion. The red began to bubble, the black of the treads and the holes began to crack, and the white began to shift, swirl, and pulsate. A thin hiss began to emanate from the fabric of the canvas as it began to vibrate and grow warm to the touch. Hotter and hotter until it became unbearable, threatening to grow so strong as to burn her hands.
Lisa dropped the canvas to the floor. It let out a deep, metallic thud as it connected with the carpet below. The paint began to cinder and fall apart as it hit the ground, breaking into chips. As she stared down, the fragments began rolling across the top of the canvas, joining together in the middle of the canvas. They conjoined and formed an odd-shaped, spherical object of amalgamated black, white, and red that pulsed slowly, like a beating heart. As the orb throbbed, the vile stench grew stronger. The object produced a fleshy squelch with every beat. Once again, as she stared at the strange apparition, she began to feel herself become drowsy.
Lisa brought her boot down upon the orb, stomping it beneath her foot. Crushing the thing beneath her heel, it exploded into a sticky mass of inky black upon the canvas, shooting plumes of red, fetid smoke from its shattered form. The smog bellowed out of it as it spasmed, threatening to engulf the room. The smoke felt powdery on her body, sticky, and barbed. She could feel it trying to worm its way inside her skin, lashing at her body like the rough tongue of a cat. Her eyelids fought at her attempts to keep them open. She knew that she had to get out of this room.
Covering her face, she sprinted for the door. She could feel the smog rise from below. It was fumigating her place of rest, of work – her sanctuary. She could feel it clawing at her through the thin fabric of her leggings, lurching over her body, pulling at her shirt, and trying to crawl inside the top of her boots.
Reaching the door, she pulled it open and turned to look at the canvas. The sticky black began to shift and move as if it knew it was being watched. It stretched across the cloth, starting to take shape as the canvas vibrated below it, shaking as the thing began to take form. The edges of the canvas singed, crackled, and began to burn.
The inky puddle shifted into what looked like the mouth of a cave. Against the white of the canvas, it appeared as if it sat amongst a snowscape. Lisa didn’t know how she knew it, but she could tell that it was a message. Whatever was responsible for this was calling to her, revealing to her where it dwelled.
She watched the burning canvas dissolve to nothing but cinder and ash before exploding into a cloud of red, hideous smoke. She left the room and closed the door behind her.
#
The smoke crept beneath the door as she caught her breath. It slithered towards her through the cracks, the keyhole, and the sides of the doorframe. Any space it could squeeze through in its attempts to molest her with its powdery embrace. Lisa slammed her foot against the door and springboarded herself down the hall. She leapt towards the stairs, sliding down the bannister as she cursed under her shortening breath.
Reaching the foyer, Lisa grabbed her overcoat and threw it across her shoulders. Thick, warm, and heavy, the 1950s British Army overcoat had been well-worn by the time she had purchased it. Tattered and torn, with more than a few rips and holes to add character, any normal person would have discarded it long ago. Not Lisa, though. To Lisa, the overcoat symbolised more to her than just about anything she owned. The coat was paid for with the money from her first art commission, and to her, it was a reminder that life was on the right track. A totem that stood as a testament to her independence, self-worth, and proof that the path that she had chosen was justified. Proof to all the naysayers, the doubters, all those who told her that art would never be more than a hobby. It was the symbol of a blossoming career, where the only place to go was up. She had worn the coat every day since she had purchased it. There was nothing that she would rather have wrapped her body beneath as she ventured outside, deep into the freezing unknown. If her astral form was amber, then the colour of her Earthly shield was taupe.
The smell grew stronger as Lisa wriggled inside the coat. The smoke had begun to cascade down the stairs, spindling through the bannisters and billowing across the floorboards. Lisa pulled at the door, wincing as it refused to budge. Harder and harder she pulled as the chattering and the smell of the smoke lurched further towards her back. With sweat beginning to drizzle down her temples, she stomped her boots at the frame and prepared to give one last heave, knowing that it was now or never.
She screamed as she pulled with both hands gripped upon the handle. The door shifted back and forth in its frame, trying its hardest to submit to its mistress’ will. From behind, the smoke began to entwine its powdery fingers over her shoulders. She could almost taste it as it scratched at her nostrils. She felt dirty as it patted at her body, it caressed her thighs, as it slithered up the skirts of her coat and began pulling at her buttocks and her breasts.
With a gasp, she strained. A deafening creak sounded as the door gave – splintering in half. Without time to think, she threw the pieces to the ground and stumbled outside, squeezing through the freshly made hole.
The force of the storm hit Lisa like a slap in the face, but she didn’t care. She just wanted to get away from the smoke as quickly as her body would allow. The cold pierced her overcoat, and the falling snow cloaked her in a sheet of white so thick that it eclipsed the blackness of her hair. She found it hard to breathe with the air so cold. Her lungs ached from the freezing knives that stabbed with every sharp, exhausted intake of breath that she drew.
As she ran, Lisa looked around but could see nothing she recognised. Her house had disappeared behind her, engulfed by the snow. There were no landmarks, no buildings, no vehicles. It was deathly quiet, and there was nothing but white for as far as her eyes could see. She felt as if she were within a blank canvas, surrendering herself to the will of the unknown artist above.
Shivering, she covered her face beneath her lapels and began walking. Where she was going, she did not know. All she knew was that she had to keep warm, and with no shelter in sight, the best way to do that was to keep moving.
#
Lisa had walked for hours. The wind had howled through her ears, disorienting her. The cold had chilled her to her core, and the exhaustion of endless, objective-less marching had fatigued her. As she dropped to her knees, finally reaching the end of what her body was willing to endure, the ever-cascading snow came far above her chest. Kneeling there as the harsh winds pelted her red-raw face, she closed her eyes and accepted her end.
The gurgling wailed through the sinful din of the blizzard, causing Lisa’s mind to swirl. It grew louder until it was cacophonous, shaking and penetrating every fibre of her being. Through clenched teeth, she wailed at the sky, though there was nothing above her other than the whiteness of blank, cold death. She could have been up, down, or walking on the side of the world for all she knew.
The lashing tongues sparked her eyes back open, and it was then that she saw them. In front of her, appearing where nothing had been before, was a trail of footprints. They seemed to linger, undisturbed in the snow. As she gazed at them, she followed their journey with her eyes. They stretched into the distance, on through the blizzard, like peppercorns floating on an endless white sea. Where they led, far on the horizon, appeared something distressingly familiar: a tall, black shape. A thing strange, yet welcoming; alien, but familiar. A thing she had seen before, drawn upon her canvas by the orb: the mouth of a cave.
Lisa braced herself and grasped for any strength she could find left within. She began to sprint, following the footprints, taking note of the circular holes by their sides as she passed them by. The cave drew closer with every bounding step, and the more she ran, the more she began to feel alive. She felt rejuvenated, reinvigorated by purpose.
As she arrived, the size of the mouth of the cave threatened to black out the world. It was then, as she prepared to enter the jet-black, towering maw, that she realised it was no cave at all.
The cave shuddered before rising, wavering in the blizzard as the wind lashed its monolithic flanks. As Lisa stared at it, mouth agape, she saw that it was covered in thick, wiry bristles that collected speckles of snow at odd angles. The object throbbed and pulsed before falling backwards towards the ground, causing the world to shake.
A universe of endless white flew past Lisa’s eyes as she fell backwards. In the fathomless nothing, she screamed as she writhed. For how long, or for how far, she fell, she was unable to comprehend. Her limbs merely flailed, and her hands grasped, hopelessly, for anything that could break her fall. But there was nothing. Nothing, except the thing that had risen.
As it shook the snow from its colossal frame, the white powder showered down on her, smothering her beneath an avalanche of freezing terror. As she scrambled to dig her way out of her snowy grave, she saw her neighbourhood appear around her. She saw her home, her neighbour’s houses, and the lights of local shops twinkling within the storm. The streets were empty; they were silent, but they were unmistakably hers. She could not believe her eyes. Tuning her head to the sky, Lisa realised then that she had not been walking the well-known streets of her neighbourhood at all.
The enormity of the thing she had fallen from blocked out the whiteness of the world. It swallowed it whole and engulfed it into the inky abyss of itself. Numerous, spindly legs extended out to its side as it pushed itself into the air, high above Lisa. Attached to the thing’s legs was a gargantuan, circular body, to the front of which lay a giant, cavernous mouth, the endless black of which was stifled only by the sight of countless, pointed teeth. Amongst the darkness of its mouth, the teeth appeared as stars, glistening as they did in sparkling salivation. Above, opening one by one as the creature awoke, were a mass of forty eyes. Paralysed with fear, Lisa stood, staring hopelessly up at the beast. She wracked her brain, wondering why it seemed so familiar. Thoughts of azure moons and empty galaxies filled her mind, but she could not place why. Dropping its head, it stared into her face. It groaned and chattered indistinguishable words in the same foreign tongue that she had heard since she awoke. Its coarse fur shook in the wild winds of the storm, and as each one of the forty eyes blinked, Lisa felt herself again drift into slumber.
Lisa’s amber projection rose into the sky. As she floated towards the stars, she looked back to Earth one final time – peering down, just in time, to witness her body being torn limb from limb, her overcoat lying blood-strewn and empty to its side.
The further she drifted towards space, the colder and more azure the Earth became.
​​
Follow Mays Publishing
R. A. Daunton is an award-winning screenwriter, novelist, and musician with an MA in Screenwriting from Napier University in Edinburgh and a BA in Film from The University of Kent. He has numerous published published stories, and two of his shirt films are currently doing the rounds on the festival circuit and can be viewed at various festivals both around the world and online.
​
"From the Hollows"
The mirrored hull slithered through the sparkling warp tunnel, dancing through the stars with sleek purpose. An obsidian mirror, reflecting the emptiness it knew all too well. Through piercing eyes, the man stood, watching, ever sure. The vacuum was an inferno compared to his heart, but what could not melt could not be changed, reforged, or reshaped. A constitution, frozen, yet always reliable. The man was all he needed to be, nothing more and nothing less.
As the violet plumes reconverged and the planetoid emerged, he looked away from the viewfinder. There would be no acknowledgement of a job well done. No words of affirmation were necessary; they were all there to do a job and would carry it out without question or need for approval.
Captain Alzhahn ran his hand over the armrest of his chair. The bridge of the Frumentarii hummed in anticipation as he sat down and crossed his legs. He looked over his crew and calculated their next move. The members of his ship were the best of the best, men and women who had been handpicked from across Terra and her colonies for their specific—and unique—skills, honed to a razor-sharp edge through years of gruelling training and fieldwork. The Frumentarii flew no flag, its name would never be sung, and its victories never celebrated. The crew had a singular purpose, and it would be kept secret by every ear that ever heard it, one way or another—for space was a terrifying place, more so than anyone could ever know. The only thing keeping the nightmares found amongst the stars from revealing themselves to the people of The Known was the crew of the Frumentarii. And they would take that knowledge to the grave.
‘Elztoria, report,’ Alzhahn ordered.
A thin, stern woman with long, blonde hair, Elztoria was a science officer. She was dressed all in black. ‘We are close enough to Beherit I, Captain.’
‘The atmosphere should be clean,’ Vurn said. She was another science officer. Also dressed in black, she was raven-headed and olive-skinned. ‘I also do not foresee any difficulty descending to the surface. This was, until recently, a milquetoast mining colony. There should not be any issues below other than what was stated in the reports. Initial scans show a slight deviation in the population, but nothing which couldn’t be explained by an accident. Apart from the beacon, everything appears normal for what you’d expect from a mining colony.’
‘Affirmative,’ replied Alzhahn, attaching a small sidearm to the thigh of his trousers with a buckled strap.
‘Grav-discs fully charged and onboarded,’ proclaimed Mann. He was a muscle-bound, shaven-headed man in a sleeveless rolled-neck sweater and flared trousers.
Vurn put her hand on Elztoria’s shoulder. ‘This mission is no good.’
The Captain, Elztoria, Vurn, and Mann, grabbed their long-barrelled rifles and walked down to the transport shuttle. ‘Yeah, I think this whole thing stinks,’ Mann said. ‘A whole colony of miners and farmhands goes quiet, and what? And we’re the first ones that they send in? Not the military? Not even a scouting vessel? Us? Going off, what? Some busted broadcast from a distress beacon.’
‘We are the scouting party, the military, and the damn exorcism if need be, Mann,’ uttered Elztoria. ‘You know that as good as anyone.’ I know it feels like Decanfore, but we made it out. Now we’re here. We didn’t die then, and we aren’t going to die now.’
Mann looked up at Elztoria and smiled. ‘You science types always know the right thing to say.’
Alzhahn held a long, golden shamshir. Holding it up, he turned it over in front of his face. It appeared to vibrate and shimmer in the space between his fist and face, humming as if powered by a battery. He waved it up and down, leaving smoky, red tendrils dancing in the air as if it had burned the atmosphere around it. Pressing a button on the hilt, the shamshir took solid form and ceased humming. As Elztoria stared at the captain, she could have sworn she saw the sides of his mouth twitch as he inserted the weapon into the scabbard dangling from his belt.
#
The shuttle was smooth on its descent, traversing the high winds of Beherit I like a scissor through crepe paper. As the ship approached the surface, Alzhahn slicked back his shoulder-length hair and placed a wide-brimmed hat upon his head.
‘Approaching Hinom, Landing Zone VII,’ proclaimed Lansor, the shuttle pilot. ‘Sorry there’s no welcome party for you, but I think they might be a bit preoccupied.’
The captain looked out of the shuttle window at the dock below. The landing zone was built into the black rock of the planet, the mineral that had been so sought after by the settlers there and gave the entire planet its distinct look of endless night.
It was Monozium. Unbreakable and surprisingly light, unlike any other material in The Known. It was used in starship and weapon manufacturing. The Frumentarii was built from it, as well as rifles, the grav-discs, even the shamshir. It was first discovered on Beherit I but had since been found in more plentiful numbers on planetoids closer to the Inner Belt. The planet was all but forgotten.
‘Why are we here?’ asked Mann. ‘Why are we being sent down to check up on some washed-up old mining colony?’
‘It’s not about the Monozium,’ replied Elztoria. ‘It can’t be. It has to be something else.’
‘We are here to respond to the distress call,’ uttered Alzhahn. ‘Sent two weeks ago on a public channel, broadcasting things they shouldn’t be broadcasting to the galaxy.’
‘That’s what I’m worried about, sir,’ replied Mann.
‘It’s not our job to worry, Mann. Our job is to do whatever they tell us to do and to do it quietly,’ said Alzhahn. ‘We are merely here to turn the beacon off. Terra can’t have any spacer turn up and find out what happened here.’
‘And to deal with whatever caused this in the first place,’ said Elztoria. ‘It’s not an important place now, but it once was. The people here have been digging for longer than any other colony. Digging for longer means digging deeper. Who knows what they have seen below the planet.’
Elztoria and Mann approached the window. The world outside the shuttle was barren and desolate, windswept and dusty. Not a soul was visible as far as their eyes could see, neither alive nor dead, a ghost planet for a ghost ship and her ghost crew.
‘Coming down now!’ yelled the shuttle pilot yelled as they landed on Hinom, the capital mining pit of Beherit I.
#
‘The beacon is one klick north,’ stated Vurn. ‘Looks like it should be inside one of those installations by the excavator facility.’
Through the thick dust clouds surrounding the Frumentarii away team, Vurn pointed north toward a large, imposing shadow. As Mann squinted his eyes, he could just about make it out: a towering bucket-wheel excavator.
‘Stars above, that thing is massive,’ he uttered. ‘It must be two miles high!’
‘Two point two miles, to be exact,’ answered Vurn. ‘It is a StarRov Manara, a Ganymede-class drilling system. There are only six in the entire galaxy. I believe that this was the first. The arm can stretch out for over four miles when fully extended.’
‘Damn,’ uttered Mann. ‘Have you ever seen anything like that before, sir?’ he asked Alzhahn.
‘Never,’ replied the Captain. ‘If they are drilling with something so large and for so long, the depths they have reached must be unfathomable.’
‘That is my main concern,’ answered Elztoria, ‘Considering what we heard from the beacon…’ Her words trailed off as they approached the facility. It was a congregation of several short, stout buildings with few windows and fewer doors. The buildings were connected by long, snaking, corrugated above-ground tunnels, several of which had collapsed on themselves. ‘Where is everybody?’
‘The beacon should be inside this building,’ stated Vurn, staring at a device around her wrist: her Omni-Vis. ‘I think we will find out fairly soon.’
Mann gripped his rifle and looked toward the building. His thumb hovered above the safety switch, coated in a film of sweat that began to glisten through the sandy haze.
#
The voice greeted them before they saw it. The beacon was placed in the middle of a control room, long since abandoned and surrounded by dust, sand, and debris. Tools, data pads, and work clothes lay scattered throughout the room. A control desk sat across one wall, smashed to pieces, next to a wide-open blast door leading down into the mine.
‘Emergency. Emergency. This is Aoid Forrester, Chief Mine Supervisor of Beherit I. Requesting immediate extraction for all colony members. The mine has been compromised. I repeat, immediate extraction for all colony and company personnel. The Monozium is not what we once thought. We dug too deep. There are things, creatures beneath the surface. They are down there, waiting, biding their time. We have to stop all operations across the territories. They are the Monozium. They are a part of it, all of it, across the galaxy. Their eyes, stars above, their eyes. This cannot go on, there is no more time, we —’
The message cut out and began to repeat. The crew of the Frumentarii shared a look among themselves, even Alzhahn.
‘Shut it off,’ uttered Alzhahn after a second repetition of the message.
Without needing to be told twice, Elztoria stepped forward and turned off the beacon, plunging the control room into total silence, other than a dripping of moisture echoing from within the mouth of the pit. Elztoria, Mann, Vurn, and Alzhahn turned their heads to the entrance. None of them needed to vocalise what had to come next.
#
The Monozium glistened against the dim footlights, reflecting and cutting a path through the dank inner mine. Though the light was low, the mirrored stone consumed the beams of the small guidelights like a thirsty desert traveler, gulping it up like water in an oasis. The cavern was titanic, stretching as far and as deep as the crew could see or comprehend, and as they traveled down the endless, hollow earth, there appeared to be no end in sight. The massive, carved gash from the bucket-wheel extractor let in no light from above, despite its monstrous size, but gave off the impression that the sky had been ripped open, torn apart by celestial claws through a tin can. The sidings of the mine were made from pure, cut Monozium, jagged and jutting at all angles, stabbing at the wide-open, howling depths of the planet, vibrating gently with a low, unnerving purr. The place was as barren and unwelcoming as anywhere they had seen throughout The Known, yet still they ventured on.
‘This makes me miss Efflon VII,’ muttered Mann, tripping over a shredded fuel tube hidden beneath a mass of dust and sand. ‘At least we could see where we were going.’
‘You mean the same Efflon VII where you got frostbite and had to have a new foot grafted on?’ replied Vurn. ‘That Efflon VII?’
‘I’d take that cold over this heat any day. I can’t stand this; muggy and dry, the back of my throat feels like it’s made out of sandpaper,’ replied Mann.
‘Take a moisture shot if you feel that bad,’ said Elztoria, ‘We can’t have you passing out now, not when we still have a ways to go and still haven’t seen any signs of life. It gives me a bad feeling; where could they have all gone?’
Mann grunted and nodded, then shot the science officer a sarcastic, ‘Yes, miss.’ Still, he removed a small silver tube from a pouch on his belt and put it on his neck. Gritting his teeth, Mann pressed a button on the tube and injected himself with the azure liquid contained inside. His body spasmed for a beat before he rolled his shoulders and cracked his knuckles. ‘Damn, that feels good!’ he roared, but Elztoria, Vurn, and Captain Alzhahn had already walked on.
‘No, you’re correct. It doesn’t make any sense.’ Vurn was walking next to Elztoria, her head pointed high, her gaze floating from one protruding Monozium ore to the next. ‘It’s as if the whole colony has disappeared. According to Bringham Mining Corporation reports, Beherit I has a population of over one point eight million settlers, civilians, and workers. Over eighty percent of them are located here in Hinom. Yet, nothing; not a soul, not even a hint of life other than that beacon.’
‘No ships either,’ replied Alzhahn, walking to the front of the group. ‘A mining colony of this size, producing Monozium in this quantity, even if the activity has slowed; there should have been hundreds of transport vessels on the surface.’
‘A fleet of sixteen hundred, to be precise,’ replied Vurn. ‘For both personnel and product transport off and on the world.’
‘Gone…’ uttered Elztoria. She shuddered as a chill ran down her spine. ‘What could have done something like this, captain?’
‘The beacon specifically mentioned “creatures,” so I am speculating Xeno involvement of some kind, although to what nature I cannot speculate. It was that aspect of the message that worried Terra. You know they can’t have that information broadcast before First Contact has been revealed,’ proclaimed Alzhahn. He turned his head to look at Elztoria and noticed a bead of sweat drip down her brow. ‘You are the expert of extra-terrestrial fauna, officer; what do you suppose?’
Elztoria ran the back of her hand across her forehead before wiping it dry against her tights. ‘There wasn’t enough information in the broadcast to say for sure, but it didn’t sound like anything we have come across. The rambling about Monozium? No, nothing like we have encountered. Nothing anybody has.’
‘Then we better find out for sure and make certain it stays that way,’ replied Alzhahn. ‘Vurn, what do the blueprints say about how to get to the bottom of the mine? If whatever happened here happened after they reached down to a certain point, then we would be best checking there first.’
Vurn turned away from the Monozium and checked the Omni-Vis on her wrist. She pressed two buttons, and the blueprints appeared above her wrist in blue, holographic form.
‘There is a transport elevator one hundred and eighty-six klicks to our west. It will take us to every level of the facility – all forty-six thousand if required.’
‘That will not be required,’ stated Alzhahn. If there are forty-six thousand levels here, then it is level forty-six thousand where we will find answers.’
‘Sir.’ Replied Vurn.
‘That’s a long trek, though,’ said Mann, having caught up. ‘One hundred eighty-six klicks on foot, and in this heat?’
‘It’s only going to get hotter the lower we go,’ replied Elztoria, ‘But I agree, I don’t like the idea of traveling this far on foot, especially in such open ground and with no idea what kind of danger is lurking out there.’
‘Indeed, forty-six thousand levels below the surface. Based upon the company plans, that will take us dangerously close to the planet’s core. I honestly have no idea how they were able to do it, how they were able to survive,’ said Vurn.
‘They didn’t,’ uttered Alzhahn.
‘Yes, captain. Quite correct,’ responded Vurn. ‘Our Grav-discs should be able to sustain us, even at those heats, but it’s not going to be comfortable.’
‘It’s bad enough up here as it is,’ complained Mann. Elztoria rolled her eyes.
‘But, I have some good news, at least,’ continued Vurn. ‘Half a klick from here is a transport hub. Assuming it is still operational, a bullet rail there will take us through the facility to the core. We won’t need the elevator at all. It’s a one-stop trip.’
‘Assuming that it is operational,’ repeated Mann. ‘And why do you think that will still be the case?’
‘The lights are still on, are they not?’ spat Vurn.
Sheepishly, Mann looked away from the science officer and towards the captain. It was no use, though, for he had already begun bounding towards the transport hub.
‘At least his lights are still on, anyway,’ grinned Elztoria to Vurn. Mann sighed, loud enough that it echoed through the hollowed earth. As the Monozium hummed around them, they took off behind Alzhahn.
#
‘Vurn, check the controls; Elztoria, scan for any signs of life; Mann, hold the perimeter,’ commanded Alzhahn as they entered the transport hub station. It was an open-plan platform featuring benches, vending machines, information booths, and a waiting lounge. Posters and billboards depicting moving company slogans were bolted to every wall. Messages like Keep Calm and Mine On, Monozium for the Heart, Monozium for the Soul, Bringham Mining Corporation Thank You For Your Service, and Beherit I: A Place To Settle glowed in bright, neon colours.
Each poster featured a buxom blonde woman with teased hair and a spandex, figure-hugging jumpsuit in the blue Bringham company colours.
Alzhahn approached one of the moving posters and studied it for a beat. As he gazed into her eyes, the woman smiled and blew him a kiss from her hand.
She was Bettie the Bringham Bombshell. Applications to join off-world Bringham mining colonies increased seventy-two thousand percent after she was introduced. The poor actress has been carted around the entire Known for decades, doing in-person appearances, signings, and hand-shakings. She was probably out there right now, kissing some baby somewhere. They advertised it as one of the job perks, “Join up and meet Bettie!” They even gave you a keyring of her likeness when you signed up.
‘They say she’s responsible for more male deaths than the Lunar Civil War,’ Vurn said.
‘I am aware of the most famous woman in the galaxy, Vurn,’ snapped Alzhahn. ‘Report; what have you found?’
‘Nothing, captain. There isn’t anything out of the ordinary. Everything is in working condition, and there are no signs of struggle. The only thing is the complete lack of life. The reports said that the beacon had been active for two months before reaching Terra, but other than the dust and the sand, it is as if this place was used hours ago. It’s like everybody just…disappeared.’
‘What do you suggest, officer?’
‘Honestly? Ask Bettie.’
‘Bettie? You want me to ask the billboard?’
‘If anybody has seen anything, it’s her. Her face is plastered all over the place.’
‘I appreciate the attempt at humour. Call the bullet.’
‘It might take a while to arrive. The console says that it is still down in the core.’
‘Very well,’ sighed Alzhahn. ‘Call it.’
#
‘Did you hear that?’ asked Mann, pointing his rifle towards the glass partition separating the platform from the waiting room.
‘Hear what?’ replied Elztoria, looking up from her vibrating Omni-Vis. It was making a low, humming noise as she walked the platform. Her brow furrowed as the vibrations and the sound appeared to grow and then diminish in intensity depending on the direction she was pointing the device. ‘There’s something here,’ she muttered to herself.
‘I don’t like this, Elzy. I think there’s something behind the glass. I heard it move.’
‘Shut up for a second, will you?’ Elztoria hissed. She pointed the device towards the waiting room, and it began to shake violently against her wrist, beeping quickly and sharply. ‘Take the safety off your rifle.’ She floated a couple of feet off the ground and removed the blaster from her thigh.
‘You take the window, I’ll get the door,’ stated Mann, clicking the safety of his rifle.
Floating above the window, Elztoria jammed the heels of her boots into a metal vent and let herself hang, her ponytail swaying back and forth like the pendulum of a grandfather clock. She pointed her rifle and the small, glimmering pistol at the window and waited for Mann to make his move.
Mann pointed two fingers at his eyes, to Elztoria, then down to the door. He gestured to the window with a nod, rolled his shoulder, and then put his hand against the door to the waiting room. He waited for Elztoria to reply: a nod and a circular rotation of the hand holding her blaster. He felt the hard plastic handle in his hand grow slippery with sweat as he received the signal that she was ready. Swallowing a mouthful of saliva, he took a deep breath through his nose and then barged the door open with his shoulder.
A quick, deep shot sounded through the platform, followed immediately by the noise of shattering glass.
#
Alzhahn stood by the poster depicting the flashing words Mining on Beherit I: Drill Deep and I’m Yours to Keep! He let out a dry sigh and tapped on the screen with his knuckle, impatient for the mascot to make her appearance. A couple of long seconds passed, which he used to consider the absurdity of what he was about to do, but he knew that Vurn was right more often than she was wrong. As he felt the urge to turn heel rise within him, coming dangerously close to overruling his better judgment, she poked her head out from the side of the poster.
‘Hello, handsome,’ said the voice, swaggering out from a pair of speakers in a comically strong 20th-century Dixie drawl. ‘If you aren’t a big old hunk of man, or what! What can I do for you? You aren’t signing up to be an honourable member of this colony, are you? We sure could use a man like you!’
Alzhahn felt himself getting light-headed as the rage built inside him. He clenched his fists, digging his nails so deeply into his leathery skin that he could start to feel the skin break. ‘Bettie. I have some questions, please. About the mine, about Hinom, about Beherit I.’
‘Gee, I’d love to answer them for you, feller! But why don’t we talk about you signing up for a little tour of duty here on Hinom first? It sure is a wonderful place!’ A long, spandex-clad leg appeared below Bettie’s face, seductively kicking itself up and down from bent to straight, repeating hypnotically. The stiletto-heeled, black knee-length boot lowered after a couple more repetitions, coming down upon the bottom of the poster, and Bettie pulled herself into full view. The zip of her jumpsuit had been pulled down below the bottom of her breasts, and she adjusted her cleavage before looking up, putting a hand over her mouth and giving Alzhahn a cheeky look as if she had been caught doing something she wasn’t supposed to. ‘Oops!”
‘What makes you think I’m not already a settler here?’ Alzhahn said, his blood boiling at having to play along with the charade.
‘Why, I’d remember a face like yours. No, you’re new to these parts. Come on, I can get the paperwork up right now. Right here on this screen. It doesn’t take more than five seconds to sign up, and afterwards, when you’re all settled, I’ll be right here with you the whole time, right by your side! I can even sit on your lap if you like!’ She broke into a hysterical fit of giggles at this, ‘Hehe!’ Her chest jumped up and down with every laugh, coming dangerously close to falling out of her outfit.
‘No,’ he stated. He had begun to have enough. ‘I am Captain Alzhahn. I am here from Terra on official, confidential business.’ He raised his Omni-Vis to the front of the poster and pressed a single button. ‘Here are my credentials. You will now answer all of my questions. I am getting bored of this.’
‘Aww,’ Bettie sulked, falling to her knees and sucking her thumb. ‘You’re no fun.’
‘Are you quite finished?’
‘I suppose,’ she said, sticking out her tongue and blowing Alzhahn a raspberry. ‘What is it you want to know?’
‘You can start by telling me what happened here. What happened to everybody? Where are the people in charge?’
‘Oh, that?’ she replied. ‘Why, they didn’t go anywhere. Nope, nowhere at all!’
‘What do you mean? I don’t see any of them. Where have they gone, Bettie?’
Bettie, once again, put her hand over her mouth and giggled. ‘Hehe!’
Before Alzhahn could press the matter, the noise of breaking glass echoed across the station.
#
‘Who are you? What are you doing here?’ yelled Mann, pointing his rifle at the man. He was cowering in the corner of the waiting room, covered in broken glass and what looked like weeks of dirt and grime encrusted into his face and oily, unkempt hair. On his body, he wore a Bringham jumpsuit complete with an enamel pin badge of Bettie attached to the collar. Surrounding him were dozens of empty water bottles and cans of dry food.
‘Answer him! Now!’ demanded Elztoria as she floated into the room through the broken glass, her rifle still smoking. ‘My next shot won’t be a warning! There’s no glass in my way anymore, so I suggest you listen!’
The man scuttled backwards, trying to increase the space between himself and the angry-looking man and woman waving laser rifles his way. Upon hitting the wall, he clutched the pin badge and began mumbling. ‘Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot! She did it, she told us to go! We had no idea. No idea!’
Elztoria’s heels crunched against the fragments of broken glass as she returned to the ground and shot Mann a fast, sideways glance with her eyes. He shrugged his shoulders and stepped closer to the man, reaching his free hand out in a show of friendship. His rifle, though, was still unmistakably pointed towards his chest.
‘What are you talking about?’ asked Mann. ‘Do you live here, work here? Are you a miner? We aren’t here to hurt you. We are here to help.’
‘No, no, no. No help,’ stuttered the man.
Elztoria edged closer. The sound of more glass cracking beneath her feet caused the man to turn his head her way with widened, frightened eyes.
‘Whoa!’ she uttered. ‘Easy now, he’s telling the truth. We are from Terra; we received a distress call. Was that you who sent it?’
‘No. No call. Forrester did that. He’s gone, gone to the core. To be with her. With them. With all of them. But not me, no. Not me. I’m too smart for that, I hid. I hid away where they couldn’t get me. Safe. Just me and her. Safe.’
‘Slow down,’ said Elztoria. ‘What are you talking about? Who are you? Tell us your name.’
‘He’s gone loopy. You won’t get anything from him,’ scoffed Mann.
‘Linklater, sir,’ stuttered the man.
‘Stop right there! I’m warning you!’ yelled Mann.
Linklater had attempted to bring his hand to his forehead to salute. He quickly returned it to his side after sensing Mann wasn’t messing around.
‘Linklater, okay. We are getting somewhere now,’ said Elztoria, trying to calm the situation. ‘What do you do here?’
‘Live,’ replied Linklater. ‘I live here.’
‘Here? In the station?’ asked Elztoria.
‘Yes. But not always. I used to live up there as well. Sometimes down there. Anywhere she told me to go.’
‘Are you a miner?’ asked Mann. ‘What did you do here? He doesn’t look like a higher-up, Elztoria. Probably just some drone; he won’t know anything.’
Linklater glared at Mann. ‘Don’t like him,’ he spat.
Elztoria took another step forward. ‘It’s okay, Linklater. He won’t harm you. None of us will. We need to know what happened here at the mine, though. Where did all your friends go? Can you tell us that?’
‘No friends. Only her. She is the one.’
‘No surprises there,’ chuckled Mann. ‘To Venus with your friends; what about your colleagues? Forrester? Tell us where the people in charge went.’
‘I told you already. Down! They went down!’
‘To the core?’ asked Elztoria. ‘That is where we are heading next. Is that where we will find everybody?’
‘No, not everybody. Not me. I’m here, safe. Safe with her.’ He pulled the badge up and kissed it with his cracked lips.
With the sound of an electrical thunk, a poster frame behind the man sprang to life. Startled, Mann turned his rifle away from Linklater to focus on the newly awakened piece of company propaganda. The words Safety in Numbers: Join Up Now! began to appear on the screen in front of a photograph of the bucket-wheel extractor. Upon seeing that the poster was no threat, he lowered the rifle, brushed a layer of broken glass off a bench, and sat down. ‘Okay. Who are you talking about? Who’s this woman you keep mentioning? Your wife?’
Elztoria lowered her weapons and sat beside Mann, slotting the pistol back into its holster on her thigh as she crossed her legs.
Linklater giggled and put his hand to his mouth. ‘No, not my wife. But soon, maybe, if I’m lucky—yes. I do everything she says, maybe then. She’s told me so.’
Once again, Mann and Elztoria shared a worried look. ‘Who are you talking about?’ repeated Elztoria. ‘Who told you this? Told you to do what?’
‘I think I know who he’s talking about,’ stated Alzhahn, opening the door to the waiting room. Vurn stood outside the broken window, pointing her rifle inside toward Linklater. ‘Why don’t you show up and tell us yourself, Bettie? Tell us everything that you told him. About the mine, about what’s down there by the core. About the Monozium. That’s what this is all about, after all. Is it not?’
Elztoria and Mann turned their heads to watch their captain enter and strut across the room, stopping in front of the poster next to Linklater. The dishevelled man looked up from the floor and continued to laugh. ‘Yes, please! Let her come and show you! The most beautiful, wonderful girl in the entire Known!’
Vurn groaned and lowered her rifle. ‘It’s never easy, is it?’ she uttered as she floated over to Elztoria and Mann.
Alzhahn tapped on the poster and waited for a response. ‘Come on out, Bettie. I still have some questions I need you to answer.’ After taking a quick look down at Linklater, he grabbed him by the chest of his jumpsuit and pulled him up to his feet. ‘I have someone with me. Do you know this man?’
Bettie appeared on the poster, swinging on the rungs of the extractor like they were monkey bars. She had changed from her usual jumpsuit into a matching combination of company blue leggings and a sports bra. On her feet were matching trainers, and her hair had been straightened down and pulled back with a thick hairband. ‘Oh! Hi there, lovely!’ said the mascot. ‘You caught me working out! I’m…’
Mid-sentence, Bettie began doing pull-ups, making a point of pushing her breasts against the top of the bar with every rep.
‘…All…’
Pushing herself to the top of the bar, she raised her legs in the air and held herself there, hand-standing miles above the earth, legging-bedecked buttocks knowingly displayed to the front of the poster. Linklater began to breathe heavily, pushing his face up to the screen. Suddenly, Bettie appeared, close-up at the front of the poster, ringing wet. Surprised, Linklater jumped back from the screen with such force that he would have fallen if Alzhahn hadn’t been holding on to him.
‘…Sweaty!’
Pulling a towel out of thin air, she began to dry herself off, giggling as she went. ‘Tee-hee!’
Vurn rolled her eyes, looking down at Elztoria. ‘Stars above.’
‘What do you want to know, darling?’ Bettie purred. ‘I’m all yours. Just let me change first, yeah?’ With a wink of her eye and a spin of her body, Bettie evaporated into a cloud of cartoon smoke and stars.
‘No!’ gasped Linklater, raising his hand in protest.
Before they knew it, Bettie had reappeared from the cloud, dressed again in her jumpsuit, boots, and with her giant, backcombed hair. ‘Good to go, handsome. Shoot!’
Alzhahn sighed. ‘Are you done?’ he asked. ‘I want you to tell us what’s been happening here.’
‘Why, that’s easy, honey!’ sang Bettie. ‘Mr. Linklater and I have been helping out, that’s all! Just wait until you see what wonders we have uncovered here. You’re going to burst!’
‘I have been good, Bettie? A good boy, for you and the company?’ simped Linklater.
‘You sure have, ducky. You quacked real good, don’t you worry! You’ll get what’s coming your way,’ replied Bettie. Alzhahn couldn’t help but notice a hint of disgust in the mascot’s voice that Linklater seemed oblivious to.
‘Thank you, Bettie. Thank you so much!’
‘Enough,’ uttered Alzhahn. ‘Get to the point.’
‘Gee, you are a grumpy one, aren’t you? Fine, but why tell you when I can show you?’ declared Bettie. ‘That would be much more fun, don’t you think, ducky?’
‘Yeah!’ answered Linklater, nodding and clapping his hands. Alzhahn scowled down at him.
‘What’s got into him?’ whispered Mann to Elztoria and Vurn. ‘To make a fool out of yourself like that, in front of strangers no less.’
‘What’s the matter, Mann?’ replied Vurn. ‘Haven’t you ever been in love?’
‘Sure I have. But I don’t know what that is. That’s not love, that’s embarrassing.’
‘I think it’s cute,’ uttered Elztoria. ‘I like it when a man shows reverence.’
Mann scoffed. ‘Yeah, you would. Elzy Blackheart: Maneater of the stars.’
‘There’s a reason you’re single, Mann,’ spat Elztoria.
Mann chuckled. “And, what? Like you aren’t?’
‘I am. But no one hears me cry myself to sleep about it. Unlike someone I know.’
Mann turned away from Elztoria and returned his gaze toward his captain. Elztoria and Vurn shared a quick smirk between themselves and did the same, Vurn nervously scratching at the beauty mark below her eye.
‘Show us what?’ quizzed Alzhahn. ‘Stop dancing around the question and tell me what happened. I’m getting sick of this.’
‘Don’t speak to her like that!’ growled Linklater. ‘You can’t speak to her like that!’
Alzhahn looked down at the man and balled his hand into a fist.
‘It’s okay, ducky. He’s just a grumpy goose, that’s all,’ twanged Bettie before Alzhahn could act. Alzhahn un-balled his fist and let Linklater out of his grasp. Linklater scowled at him and threw himself against the poster, pushing his face against the screen. ‘Fine. If I tell you what happened, will you come with me? But you have got to promise to keep it a secret, now. It’s big! Can you keep a secret, sugar?’ continued Bettie, ignoring Linklater as if he were nought but an annoyance.
‘Fine. I can keep a secret. If it will hurry this along, I promise to keep whatever went on here a secret, okay?’
‘It’s only for a little bit, anyway. Company rules, you know how it is? It will all be revealed in time, don’t you worry!’
‘I feel like my head is spinning,’ muttered Vurn.
‘It’s fascinating, watching him in action. Don’t you think? I would have lost my temper far before now,’ replied Elztoria. Mann said nothing, still sulking.
‘We found something below,’ began Bettie. Suddenly, an ancient-looking mining helmet appeared on her head, complete with a blinking head lantern. ‘Down by the core. Deep in the heart of the planet. Where the juiciest Monozium dwells.’
Linklater began panting. “Yeah! Yeah!’
‘It’s a game changer, but not everybody saw it that way. At least, not at first. Bringham sure didn’t think so.’
‘But they aren’t a problem now!’ yelped Linklater.
‘No, not now,’ smiled Bettie. ‘Not thanks to you, ducky.’
‘Bringham? They own this facility, this planet,’ stated Alzhahn.
‘Do they?’ smirked Bettie. ‘They may have done. Once.’
With a loud THUNK, the next poster on the wall burst to life. It depicted a bullet-rail car speeding through molten rock and Monozium. As if leading the way, every subsequent poster in the room burst to life, one after the other. THUNK. THUNK. THUNK. They formed a trail leading towards the door to the platform.
‘Come on, darling. It will all be made clear soon enough,’ giggled Bettie. She danced off to her right and appeared in the next poster. Waving her hand at Alzhahn, she beckoned him to follow before jumping to the next screen. She leapt from every poster until she reached the one closest to the door. ‘I think I hear a train a-coming! Choo-choo!’ she yelled before disappearing.
As Alzhahn looked around the room, he caught the eyes of Mann, Elztoria, and Vurn. ‘With me, let’s go.’
‘Sir,’ they replied in chorus, standing up from the bench.
The sound of another poster sprang to life from the platform outside. They followed it, Linklater straggling behind as he stared, mesmerised by every poster, sniffing at them he passed.
#
Alzhahn, Elztoria, Mann, Vurn, and Linklater stepped through the door onto the bullet rail platform. The ground beneath their feet began to rumble and shake as they stood, looking down the empty rail. Bettie stood in a poster by the rail, dressed in the uniform of a steam train driver and holding a whistle in her mouth. As the group emerged, she began to wave and blow the whistle, letting out a sharp, harsh noise through the platform that burst out of every poster’s speaker.
‘All aboard!’ yelled Bettie before blowing the whistle again for a purposefully long, annoying time. She held the note, winking at Alzhahn and tipping her hat at him as they locked eyes. He gritted his teeth and walked forward, running his thumb across his neck to tell her to stop.
‘This woman,’ groaned Vurn, holding her hands to her ears.
The platform began to shake violently as Bettie’s whistle grew in intensity. AI did not require nor come equipped with lungs, and the threat that she could hold the noise for as long as she wished had begun to dawn on them all. Other than Linklater, who seemed to have the time of his life, dancing across the platform, spinning around in a circle with his head held high.
‘Enough!’ roared Alzhahn, but it was no use. He could not be heard over the whistle and the now thundering sound of the platform shaking around them.
Then, as if appearing out of thin air, the train materialised on the platform, and the shaking and Bettie’s whistle ceased.
Relieved, the crew of the Frumentarii removed their hands from their ears and gasped for breath. Linklater stopped his maddened dancing and drooped his shoulders, looking as if somebody had just kicked his dog.
‘Hehe!’ giggled Bettie. ‘Jump on, boys and girls! Next stop, the core of Beherit I! Better strap in and hold on to your hats because it’s a doozy! Choo-choo!’
They stepped aboard the train car and held onto the railings inside.
‘Here goes nothing,’ said Mann as the train started to vibrate.
Like a shot from a gun, the train disappeared from the station in a plume of static and smoke. The platform shook for a few seconds before settling. The posters faded, once again, to black – and it was as if none of them was ever there.
#
The train sped through the mine, following the corkscrewing rail down. A level counter on the wall flittered through digital numbers in the thousands as they descended, letting the passengers know how far and quickly they had travelled. The numbers went from one to one thousand in the blink of an eye, with the only sights outside the window being that of blurred, fiery darkness.
‘I’ve never been so thankful for gravity regulators,’ grimaced Mann as he gripped the handles of his seat.
‘You got that right, big boy!’ chuckled Bettie. ‘All courtesy of the good, generous people at the Bringham Mining Corporation! Think big, think Bringham!’
‘We have had gravity regulators and bullet-rails on Terra for centuries,’ scoffed Vurn. ‘Bringham did not invent them.’
Bettie pulled a face and stuck her tongue out at Vurn before turning to Alzhahn. ‘I don’t like her. Why do they have to come along?’ she said, thumbing her hand toward Vurn and Elztoria.
‘Don’t like them either,’ uttered Linklater as he stared out the window. ‘I only love Bettie.’
‘Aww!’ chirped Bettie. ‘I like you too, ducky.’
Vurn and Elztoria rolled their eyes at one another as the counter hit level twenty-one thousand.
‘Starting to get hot. Hotter, I mean,’ groaned Mann. He wiped a cascade of sweat from his forehead with his hand.
‘I like it!’ replied Bettie. ‘I love getting sweaty, don’t you?’
Mann looked up at his captain with a pained expression on his face. Alzhahn gave him a sympathetic I know look back and shook his head.
‘Is he going to be alright?’ asked Mann, nodding at Linklater. ‘He doesn’t have a grav-disc or a mining suit on.’
‘Don’t worry about him, he’ll be fine. Won’t you ducky.’ stated Bettie.
‘Yeah,’ responded Linklater, his head quickly shifting right to left as his vision attempted to keep up with the outside world.
Thirty-three thousand.
‘Sure,’ muttered Mann. ‘Whatever you say.’
‘Not our problem,’ scoffed Elztoria. She received a playful nudge in the ribs from Vurn, but before she could respond, the train pulled to a stop.
‘Gentlemen and…ladies,’ announced Bettie. She shot daggers with her eyes towards Vurn and Elztoria. ‘We have reached our destination: Beherit I, level forty-six thousand! This will be the final stop of our journey, so please be sure you have all your luggage and personal effects. There will be no more stops after here, the hottest of hot, the most boiling base on Beherit, hotter than hell, the scorching station – the planet’s core!’ She blew her whistle, long and hard.
Trying their best to ignore her, the crew picked themselves up from their seats and wobbled towards the exit of the train car. Their grav-discs blinked red and screeched at them as the doors opened and the heat from outside blasted into the train.
‘Bleed it,’ uttered Mann. He put his hand up, trying to protect himself from the heat. ‘I feel like I just stepped onto the sun!’
Vurn squeezed Mann’s shoulder, gave him a knowing smile, and strolled past him.
‘It has been a pleasure travelling with you. We thank you for your patronage,’ Bettie winked as they passed her. ‘Come on, ducky. Time’s up!’
‘Yes, Bettie,’ replied Linklater as he followed them onto the platform.
#
The station at the core was different from the ones above. While the others had been open-plan affairs full of niceties and billboards, station forty-six thousand was utilitarian in sight and purpose. Housed within a massive heat-shielding canvas, the place felt more like a tent than a rail station.
‘It’s so stuffy,’ complained Mann as he looked around the station. A wall of lockers ran across the side of the canvas, from the platform to the far end of the canvas. At the end of the wall was a large airlock door.
‘And this is it with enviro-conditioning on,’ replied Vurn, holding up her Omni-Vis as she scanned the area.
As Alzhahn stepped out of the train, the posters in the station came to life. Bettie stood dressed back in her mining gear behind a blank, black background. The screens flickered and crackled under the heat as she grinned at him, sweat patches dotting her uniform.
‘Come on, ducky Chop-chop!’ she sang, clapping her hands.
Linklater began hobbling over to the lockers, hunchbacked beneath the appalling heat. ‘Yes, Bettie!’ he said, pulling one open.
Ignoring the man, Alzhahn, Mann, Vurn, and Elztoria began to walk through the station towards the airlock.
‘There’s still nobody here, Bettie,’ uttered Elztoria. ‘You’re not taking us for a ride, are you?’
Bettie appeared on a poster next to Alzhahn. ‘Don’t’ worry, handsome,’ Bettie flirted. ‘They are just behind the airlock, having a wail of a time! You’re going to love what they’ve done with the place. I know it!’
Elztoria glared at the poster but received no response from Bettie. ‘You ready, Mann?’ she whispered.
‘Always,’ he responded, flicking the safety off his rifle.
Alzhahn put his hand against the airlock door and peered outside through the window. There was nothing but darkness.
‘I’m afraid this is as far as I can go,’ groaned Bettie.
‘No!’ protested Linklater, running up to the rear. He was dressed in a heat-shielding mining suit, covered from head to toe in blue. There was a large backpack slung across his shoulders with pipes and wires scuttling out to various points on the suit, and his covered face included a respirator that made his voice take on an odd, robotic quality.
‘But don’t you worry,’ continued Bettie. ‘I’ll be seeing you soon.’ She winked before disappearing. The posters hummed for a beat and then fizzed. The black backgrounds reset to a blue screen, vomiting flashing code and notifications about errors.
‘Bettie!’ wailed Linklater, falling to his knees. Tears began to dribble down his cheeks, barely visible through his mask.
‘Finally,’ groaned Vurn.
A roaring CLICK boomed from the airlock door, followed by a steamy hissing noise.
‘Stand back,’ commanded Alzhahn. ‘Be prepared.’
Slowly, the doors opened. The crew of the Frumentarii stood, weapons clutched and pointed into the darkness that greeted them. As the airlock opened, they were met with the core of Beherit I.
‘Whoa,’ uttered Mann. ‘How were they able to…?’
The core was pitch black, other than the mass of flame and magma that swirled in the reflection of Monozium. The choking darkness of the ore was attempting to snuff out the light of the core, but it was unmistakably still there, fighting for survival. A path had been cut through the ore, leading directly to the heart of the core, miles away from the airlock. But something stood there, blocking the path, twinkling in the reflective glow of Monozium.
‘I don’t believe it,’ gasped Elztoria.
Standing in the middle of the path was Bettie, all 5ft 11 of her in her 5-inch heels. In disbelief, Linklater and the crew of the Frumentarii stared at her from the airlock as she smiled their way.
‘She looks…I don’t know how to say it,’ continued Elztoria. ‘Real.’
‘Bettie!’ screamed Linklater. Alzhahn knew what was coming next and thrust his arm forward to catch the man, but he was too slow. Linklater’s suit passed through Alzhahn’s fingers as he sprinted down the path, rushing past the jutting Monozium walling them in. Alzhahn looked at the wall of Monozium and furrowed his brow, seeing what rested inside.
‘Vurn, scan them,’ Alzhahn commanded. ‘Mann, Elztoria; with me.’
‘Sir.’
Vurn began to scan the ore as the Frumentarii crew ran after Linklater. What met her as she peered inside caused her blood to run cold.
‘Stars above,’ Vurn uttered to herself. Looking back at her from inside the ore were the miners of Beherit I, eyes open, unmoving and suspended within pulsating black gunk.
Vurn looked at her Omni-Vis: Gregov Hilde, designation number 80039291072. Age 41 years old. DOB: 05/01/3219, Origin: Mars. Register to Bringham Mining Corporation, Beherit I – Sub-mine Hinom c.3238. Designation, Quarry worker. Status, Alive -BPM 50.
The ore was jammed with bodies, shoulder-to-shoulder and floating at various, contorting angles. As she moved the device across the ore, the vitals of different workers pinged up – all male, all alive, all unmoving. As far as her eyes could determine through the darkness, every piece of Monozium contained the same mass of human beings trapped inside. The cavern stretched on and on, miles high, miles wide, and miles deep. With the foundation of the planet’s core made of pure Monozium, there was enough space to contain the millions of workers and settlers registered to Beherit I, all trapped in suspended animation in the bowels of the mine.
‘Captain!’ screamed Vurn. She took off, running as fast as her legs would carry her, past endless trapped workers and Monozium ore.
Gregov Hilde, designation number 80039291072, opened his eyes and reached out of the Monozium.
#
Bettie stood, towering above Linklater. He was hugging her legs, glaring at Alzhahn and his crew. She slowly stroked his covered head with her hand, a knowing smirk on her painted face.
‘I’m so glad you could join us,’ said Bettie. ‘We had been waiting such a long time.’
‘Get away from her, Linklater,’ ordered Alzhahn. Elztoria and Mann were standing by his sides, pointing their rifles at Bettie. None of them were sure who she was addressing. But they knew something was wrong.
‘No!’ he roared. ‘I don’t take orders from you!’
‘That’s right, ducky,’ responded Bettie. ‘He’s all mine, I’m afraid. As are…all of them.’
‘What?’ asked Elztoria.
Bettie waved her free hand, and the Monozium around them began to glow, revealing the men sealed inside.
‘Captain!’ yelled Vurn as she arrived. ‘The miners, the settlers, everybody! They are trapped within the Monozium!’
Alzhahn looked around the path and studied what he saw. After a few seconds of silence, he took a step forward. ‘Why?’
‘Where are all the women, Bettie?’ growled Vurn. ‘What have you done?’
‘Oh, darling,’ Bettie replied. ‘Why, that’s easy.’
‘Explain. Now,’ commanded Alzhahn.
‘Show, don’t tell,’ giggled Bettie. ‘Ain’t that what they say?’
A shocking, gloopy noise began to splurge across the path as the men trapped inside the ore started to fall, walk, and tumble out of their cages. Exiting their prisons, they stood tall, staring silently at Bettie as if waiting for a command. Millions of beings began to fill the cavern from all angles. The light from the core dimmed as the settlers piled up, eclipsing it with their mass. So many emerged from behind the group that it began to cut off the path, sealing the way back to the airlock. Elztoria, Mann, and Vurn span around, pointing their rifles at the unmoving horde.
‘Great Terra,’ uttered Mann. ‘How is this possible?’
‘Needed the power! Needed the men!’ spat Linklater. ‘Isn’t that right?’
‘Yes, that’s right, ducky,’ replied Bettie, patting Linklater. ‘Isn’t that what everything is about, after all?’
‘The women, Bettie. What happened to all the women?’ repeated Vurn, spinning to face Bettie. Her rifle was pointed directly between her eyes.
‘No need for them!’ roared Linklater. ‘They wouldn’t listen to Bettie. They only got in the way!’
Elztoria edged forward. ‘You mean they wouldn’t go along with whatever insane scheme she cooked up.’
‘Not insane!’ replied Linklater. ‘Progress!’
Bettie patted Linklater on his head and stepped forward. He fell on his belly as her legs moved away from him, his head slamming into the dirt beneath her feet.
‘The Monozium offers more than you know. Bringham, Terra; they had no clue. They have wasted it on their weapons and starships. But if they had just looked a bit closer. A little bit…deeper,’ grinned Bettie. ‘They would have seen the truth.’
‘What truth?’ growled Alzhahn.
‘The men here, they understood. The power in the Monozium is astronomical. They just needed a little guidance, that is all. They needed to be pointed in the right direction. They needed direction. They needed me, the right person to give it to them. The Monozium, you see, is a conduit, a battery. It is the lifeblood of reality, but it requires power, and what is a battery without…juice? Once they understood, they were more than happy to give their power up for the greater good.’
‘You trapped them in there? To what end?’ asked Mann.
‘Trapped? No,’ replied Bettie. ‘They all, every one of them, entered on their own free will.’
‘Brainwashing is not free will,’ spat Elztoria. ‘That is what happened. Isn’t it? You got into their heads somehow. You tricked them in there!’
Bettie laughed. It was a dry, deep, throaty laugh, unlike anything she had displayed before. As her body convulsed, her appearance blinked and shifted as if phasing out of reality. For a brief second, the image of Bettie was replaced with a crouching, black creature, its eyes glowing golden and bright. As the sight of Bettie reappeared, the image of its eyes remained, hovering in front of her as if they had burnt their presence onto the world like a screen burn on an old television. Linklater picked himself up and stared at her, a look of confusion forming on his face.
‘B…Bettie?’ he mumbled.
‘Enough,’ stated Alzhahn. He stepped forward.
A flash of light burst across the path, followed by a low thudding sound.
‘No!’ screamed Linklater, reaching out toward Bettie.
Standing in front of the whimpering man, Alzhahn’s outstretched arm held the shamshir, its blade glistening under the hue of the Monozium. Bettie’s face smiled back at Linklater as it rolled over to him, flickering in and out of its human and creature forms. Her body dropped to its knees as a cascade of blood fountained out from its severed neck. Falling to the ground beside her head, Bettie’s body shifted as it bled out, taking on the appearance of the slimy, clawed creature. Its thin, spindly body jutted out at sharp angles along its elbows, knees and ribs where the skin was thin and the bones ascended.
‘Bettie!’ sobbed Linklater in a mass of hysteria and confusion. ‘What have you done?’ he asked, looking up at Alzhahn.
Mann, Elztoria, and Vurn span around the path, sensing the settlers begin to stir.
‘Captain? What is going on?’ asked Mann.
‘I don’t think that was Bettie,’ stated Vurn. ‘What is that thing?’
Elztoria waved her Omni-Vis over the creature’s corpse and stared at the data it returned. ‘I don’t believe it. The readings say that it is Monozium. PureMonozium. As in, it contains nothing organic at all. It shouldn’t even be alive. It certainly shouldn’t be bleeding.’
‘That isn’t filling me with confidence,’ replied Mann. ‘What do we do now?’
A miner to the side of Alzhahn stepped forward. The captain watched as he began to spasm and fizz, phasing forms between himself and Bettie like she was a ghost signal, trying to claw itself through static. The man shuddered in place as the woman, unresisted, took control of his body. After a few seconds, the miner was gone, leaving nothing but Bettie. She grinned and winked at Alzhahn as she brushed down her jumpsuit and straightened her cleavage.
‘Now, darling. Did you really have to go and do a thing like that?’ she giggled.
‘Bettie!’ yelled Linklater upon seeing her. On all fours, he scuttled towards her but was quickly pulled back by Alzhahn.
‘Don’t you get it?’ uttered Alzhahn. He slashed the sword at Bettie with his free hand, beheading her once again. ‘That is not Bettie. It never was.’
As Bettie’s corpse sank to the ground, it morphed into its extraterrestrial form. Linklater looked into the face of Alzhahn, sad and confused. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘Poor ducky,’ Bettie’s voice echoed through the core. Her image flashes across the cavern, possessing thousands of miners and settlers a second. Every letter of her words came from a different position within the planet’s centre, giving it a stuttered, displaced feel. ‘But never fear, your time to be one with me has come.’
The miners began to step forward, their arms outstretched, their monstrous visages slipping between creature, Bettie, and human with every step.
‘No,’ cried Linklater. ‘You’re not Bettie. I don’t want this! I want Bettie! The real Bettie’
Alzhahn let go of Linklater and turned to his crew. ‘Are you ready?’
‘Sir.’
Alzhahn nodded his head. ‘Now!’
Elztoria, Mann, and Vurn let loose with their rifles, Alzhahn slashing with the shamshir. Heads rolled away from the captain as he spun across the path, cutting the creatures down as they came.
‘It’s no use!’ screamed Vurn. ‘The rifles aren’t doing anything!’
Every blast of plasma from the guns bounced off the approaching miners, doing nothing to stop their descent from the Monozium ore.
‘What do we do?’ yelled Elztoria through the din of plasma fire. ‘Keep shooting? Why isn’t it working?’
‘To Venus with this!’ roared Mann. He threw his rifle at the head of the closest miner, caving in its skull and sending it crippled to the ground as it morphed.
‘The sword, the rifle,’ uttered Vurn.
‘They are Monozium! Maybe they can only be hurt by Monozium!’ responded Elztoria.
‘Worth a try,’ grinned Mann.
‘Take them back to the ore!’ commanded Alzhahn.
The crew nodded, and Mann, Vurn, Elztoria, and Alzhahn ascended. Using their grav-discs to take them above the path, they held themselves in the air and waited for the command.
‘Now!’ yelled Alzhahn, and they flew back down towards the creatures.
Each one slammed into a group of miners, pushing them towards the Monozium ore walling the path, utilising the momentum of their flight to bulldoze them inside. As they hit the ore, the world went black.
‘Now. Now you will see,’ Bettie’s voice hummed.
#
Flashes of melting orange and purple oozed through the pulsating black as they floated within the Monozium, holding the creatures in their arms. The visage of humanity had ceased upon entering the ore, and the black, sharp-toothed aliens thrashed and wailed to be set free. The strange, gritty substance they had been enveloped in slowed the beast’s movements, stopping them from reaching their fanged mouths to the Frumentarii’s throats. Still, the colours around them flew by at the speed of light.
‘Traverse the Monozium. Witness your reality fold as the new day unfolds, darling.’
As the words pounded through their heads, the crew found themselves spat out of a cluster of Monozium ore. Rolling the beasts away from their bodies, Alzhahn beheaded his and Mann’s while Elztoria and Vurn smashed their creature’s heads with the butts of their rifles.
‘Where are we?’ gasped Elztoria, looking around.
They were no longer in the core of Beherit I. The place they found themselves was bright and cool and filled with strange, pastel-coloured flora. It smelt of burnt rose petals, but the sidings of the cavern were unmistakenly made of Monozium ore. The place dwarfed even the cavern of Beherit I, stretching on as it did for miles upon end, but with beaming sunlight crying down from the open heavens above.
‘Welcome, dear. To the core of Monozium Prime,’ Bettie’s voice sang. Suddenly, she appeared before them, dressed in a short floral dress and sandals. Her hair was braided, and she wore a crown of daisy chains.
‘Explain,’ commanded Alzhahn. Even he couldn’t help but look around, the wonder clear on his face. ‘And Enough with the disguise. We know you aren’t Bettie.’
‘Very well,’ replied Bettie. Her form shifted into a large, muscular version of the creature. It had spiralling horns upon its head and a long, pointed tail that thrashed in time with the swaying movements of its body.
‘Queen…of Monozium?’ uttered Elztoria.
‘Very good,’ replied the Queen. ‘Do you see now? Why all of this was necessary? This is a junction to the stars, where all deep-core Monozium comes together as one. It is connected to hundreds of thousands of other planets across the cosmos. All it takes is the joining of Monozium to Monozium. And you are free to enter. And, of course, power. Lots and lots of charge. Every piece of ore you see here is connected to a cluster on another planet. Interstellar travel in the blink of an eye. It just requires…’
‘Life,’ declared Elztoria. ‘You sucked the life out of an entire planet so you could walk across planets! You turned all those people into those…things!’
‘Correct. Long-term Monozium exposure at that level does invoke certain changes. Wonderful, beautiful changes. Embrace the hive mind, Terrans. Open yourselves to a new, exquisite reality.’
Alzhahn walked up to the Queen and faced her eye-to-eye. ‘This is astonishing. It could change everything we know about…everything.’
‘Correct. And all it takes is the life force of a mere few million of your Terran bodies to power. Or any other humanoid creature, that is. After you change, we could find more species together, others to power the machine. Join us and begin humanity’s journey further afield than you have ever dreamed possible.’
‘Terra will need to be informed,’ stated Alzhahn. ‘Do you understand?’
‘Sir,’ responded Elztoria.
‘They will be very interested in this indeed,’ said Mann. ‘Very interested.’
‘All of these ores transport you to another world?’ uttered Vurn.
‘Yes,’ replied the Queen.
‘I see. Yes, think of the prospects.’
‘And all you need is Monozium from a Monozium-producing planet’s core to pass through. Interesting indeed,’ Elztoria said.
Alzhahn’s fist flexed. The Queen’s eyes widened. A light flashed, and with a wail, the Queen’s body dropped to the grassy floor of Monozium Prime. Alzhahn picked up her head and walked back into the cluster of ore from whence they came.
#
Upon reaching the surface of Hinom, the crew of the Frumentarii gazed at the giant bucket-wheel extractor.
‘What are you going to do now?’ stuttered Linklater.
‘Lansor, requesting pick-up from Landing Zone VII,’ spoke Alzhahn into his Omni-Vis.
‘Roger that, sir,’ replied Lansor. ‘I’ll let Issah know to vacate your chair.’
‘Are you ready, Vurn?’ Alzhahn asked.
‘Sir.’
‘What happened down there? Where did you go? Why won’t you tell me what happened? What did they do with Bettie?’ demanded Linklater.
‘Then bring it all down,’ commanded Alzhahn. ‘Terra will want this place safe when they come to pick up the pieces.’
Vurn pressed a button on her Omni-Vis, and the bucket-wheel extractor roared to life.
As the extractor descended, so too did the Amort. The crew stood and watched the beastly machine at work as they waited for pick-up, hearing the screeching sounds of Monozium upon Monozium filling the air.
#
‘Elztoria,’ uttered Alzhahn.
‘Sir?’ she answered as the Amort began to land.
‘Keep our secrets.’
‘Yes, sir.’
The sound of a blaster rang out, followed by a soft thump before Alzhahn, Mann, Vurn, and Elztoria entered the Amort and returned to the Frumentarii.
THE END
​
Follow Mays Publishing
More About R.A. Daunton
From the Hollows is a raygun gothic, sci-fi/horror story focusing on the crew of the Frumentarii. Helmed by Captain Alzhahn, the Frumentarii sails the stars in the early days of human space exploration, dealing with clandestine alien and supernatural threats that dwell amongst the cosmos. Sworn to uphold the secrets of alien life from the human populace scattered throughout the galaxy, Alzhahn and his crew will do whatever it takes to ensure that the facade of human superiority is upheld for their Terran masters. No matter what the cost.
Sailing to a far-off mining colony, the Frumentarii responds to a distress beacon broadcasting xeno-centric warnings to the galaxy. Upon reaching the seemingly abandoned facility, the crew find all traces of life missing. As the crew descends to the core of the planet, they are met with the AI mascot of the mining corporation, who leads them to the source of all the problems. Revealing that the strange ore found on the planet can facilitate instantaneous, interstellar travel using harvested lifeforce, she reveals to the crew that the miners have been used to fuel this revelation. Alzhahn and the crew understand what must be done to keep this a secret from the galaxy, and battle with the sinister creatures dwelling within the ore, as well as the entity that has taken over Bettie, the mascot of the mining corporation.
Focusing on the themes of corporate greed and the dangers of artificial intelligence, From the Hollows is a space-trekking warning not to succumb to the empty promises offered by big business, wrapped up in a bow of star-faring adventure, a love letter to 60s and 70s sci-fi, and cosmic horror.
I am an award-winning screenwriter, novelist, and musician with an MA in Screenwriting from Napier University in Edinburgh and a BA in Film from The University of Kent.
Some of my previously published stories include Man/Maid for Black Sheep Magazine, and Edin and Padlocks, both for an upcoming anthology by Hex Arcana Publishing. My short films, A Whole Host and Wooden Masks, are currently doing the rounds on the festival circuit and can be viewed at various festivals both around the world and online.
Ramesh Dohan lives in Toronto, Canada. He is a poet at heart and a short fiction writer dabbling with the art--when he isn't consulting.
​
Memories
One late winter evening
When the wind off the lake
Stirs the day’s memories
One of my thoughts eloped
With a leaf
The wind blew of the tree
While a sparrow distracted
Went in hot pursuit
Across the fading landscape
A Winter’s tale
Beyond the thick curtains
The snowflakes are
Starting to fall
Each one determined
To bury something
I pay a visit
To an iron typewriter
That has not lifted
A key in years
Perhaps there is
A word in the dictionary
To describe this day
​
Follow Mays Publishing
Raven Yoder majored in English with a focus in Writing Studies at Texas A&M University, Corpus Christi. She produced a Haas-award winning research paper and has published multiple original poems.
​
Fences
​
The Feeling of Yellow
Nineteen years ago, a time when my knees barely rose above the willowy grass of our lawn, found me cowering in the doorway of our house, my tiny body consuming the fiery heat of the late afternoon sun. From a vantage point I was much accustomed to, I watched my mother. My frightened eyes peeped timidly upwards where they were soon shocked into attention. A loud bang rattled the room, and I screamed as the walls shook and wood splintered to the floor around my feet. My mom was a recognizable savage. Her rage filled the air, and the chair she’d thrown laid in mangled pieces not even inches from where I’d stood.
And even at two years old, I was used to these eruptions. These volcanic explosions of fury and fervor were the only impressions I had of my mother—the only side of her I saw and the only one I knew. And even then, I was haunted by them, assuming, in my innocence, that the release of her demons was my fault. It wasn’t until many years later that I understood: it wasn’t only the demons to blame, it was the spirits.
From the time of that first memory, an air of mystery and anarchy permeated my thoughts and surrounded my mother. Her sporadic appearances became only added to the charade and secrecy she portrayed. She was a being only present some birthdays and Christmases, but one omnipresent in the confused consciousness of my cluttered young mind. ‘Mother’ became synonymous with ‘dread.’
That day the chair splintered, my mom taught me how yellow felt. The sun sucked up the color, introducing me to a liquid and hazy hue. Where the sun should caress, it burned. Much like my mother, where it should enlighten and inspire, it ruined and scalded. Yellow whispered provision and renewal but its touch was scorching isolation.
I wish I would have known fences then. I didn’t yet know how to shield myself from suffering. I didn’t know there were things in the world that warranted boundaries at all. And I didn’t learn until later how to form fences. But what I did know even at my young age: yellow was a lie.
Chain-link
If I stood within the little diamonds that formed the chain-link and stretched my neck to the point of strain, I could almost see over the top of the fence and into my neighbor’s yard. The yard was sparsely decorated and always empty. But it held one thing that captivated my attention: an old yellow wooden swing. I didn’t know then that the swing would introduce me to a home that held me better than my own.
I was five when they moved in. I watched as the once barren yard became a miniature amusement park. They added a tire swing, a zip line leading to shallow waters, and a tree house.
Again, I stood in the chain-link, hands raw and red, and wished there were no boundaries.
Through the fence, I called to the blonde boy. “Can I use your swing?” He was currently rocking back and forth on the yellow board I so envied.
The boy shrugged. “I guess, but it’s my turn right now.”
That reluctant statement was all the confirmation I needed.
I finished my trek over the fence and looked behind me. A jungle met my eyes. The bushes barricaded any real view. But the glowing summer jasmine drifted towards me in the breeze, and the bamboo towered behind the wooden shed in the middle of our yard. I had never seen my yard from a visitor’s viewpoint before. But I had an entire amusement park now. Why would I want a jungle?
I turned back to my newfound adventure and found the brash blonde looking at me with crossed arms. “I guess you can have your turn now,” he said, his hand stopping the swing’s sway.
The painted yellow board creaked as it swung me higher. Higher than anywhere I’d ever been before, towards Heaven’s light. The breeze caught my hair, causing the long golden waves to tremor and fall. Up here, the glimmering sun rays caught me with eyes wide open before releasing me into my new reality.
Summers stayed and strayed, leaving in their wake little memories with my new friends: tomboy madness and bunkbed secrets, home-grown garden suppers set inside the lawn-mower-created homemade baseball field on the lawn. There were zip-lined brigades to the shallows at the edge of the yard and tree-house carvings and codes that all disappeared, secreted behind our lips, once we crossed the kitchen’s watery linoleum tiles.
I learned a sense of adventure fences never could confine, and the sunshine was the right shade again: a pale and inviting saffron that saturated my very bones.
Chicken Wire: From A Viewpoint Across the Fence
The finish rubs off in your hands, cheap chicken-wire plastic yielding to iron. Fingertips rusty and red, you guide the wire around its new partner: damp wood embraces the weakened, feigned fibers.
Sunshine has birthed this day, and you think it forged her, too. Today, she smells of lavender and sweat swirled with a spice and sweetness you can’t quite put your finger on. Her hair glints violet in this afternoon’s summer. She was blonde long ago, but you think she looks better this way, more real. Occasionally, she pushes her hair over her shoulders in your direction as if it wasn’t already magnetic enough. As if you weren’t already hopelessly welded to its shimmer.
The heat kisses her cheeks crimson, and you know that, later, once she’s washed the day off and her cold palms find her face, she’ll tell you she should have worn sunscreen. And you told her so. Had told her that the lemon summer wouldn’t hesitate to cook everything in its path, including her. Her stubbornness should bother you—especially when it hurts her—but, instead, it pours through you like honey: warm and lilac.
Your eyes braze her body, fluid hips yield to sharp ribs that soothe. She stiffens and turns at the waist, purposely accentuating the curves your hands cradle like a Catholic holds a rosary.
She smiles. And her cheekbones display it well. Her happy coaxes her spine straighter and lightens her russet eyes. The same smile that encapsulates and enchants strangers is yours. All yours. Damp earth stains the crimson stain across her cheeks. Yet, somehow, she seems even more warm this way. Like she is honey, too.
The chicken wire hugs the post, its new home, and you hammer in the nail that you hold. Minutes ago, she wouldn’t stop asking you to let her help.
“It’s our garden after all,” she whines, emphasizing the second word.
You wouldn’t hear of it. She could accidentally hammer her finger instead. Her fragile, lily white fingers grip your arm in case the hammer slips. And, even though she hurts herself, you’d never let anything touch her. Lilies, iron, and sunshine were never meant to coexist.
Fences for Miles
I hold tighter, mesh my solvent elbows with the lines of his chest. Maybe, if I hold tighter, it’ll stop his ribs from shaking. Blue so deep it claws its way out in sputters and sobs. An overflowing well: the brim is clouded with murky tears and phlegm-coated words. If he is midnight right now, I am amber. His light in the dark—but I am trying to illuminate my own onyx: splashes of dandelion against a dripping, draining dusk.
Light sparks, flickers, fades. And I am leaving here today. Putting miles of fences between him and I, later and now. He talks, and I cannot hear—words are writing themselves over and over and over again in my head. I’m listening to their slow sprint, their scrawl on the slick velvet canvas of mind over matter: “Maybe if I hold him tighter, it’ll stop his ribs from shaking. Hold him tighter. Tighter. Hold him tighter.”
Silence.
I don’t pray except during the last eighteen seconds when I’ve been begging God to give him some peace. Plead, wait, hold. Feel amber melt midnight. Pause, wait. Hold. Tighter. Their sprawl is artifice—slipping sharp against silk. I cannot hear him—these words have pulled me too far away into another abyss altogether. But all of the darkest darks look the same.
I listen to rhythm, wager with Myth, and tense in the too-loud dandelion-drenched air. Wisps of shadows sneak in, drench an embrace already flooded with collapsed faces. I want to stay his yellow, but I can’t even be my own.
​
Follow Mays Publishing
About Rebecah Hall
​
Rebecah Hall was born in Pecos, Texas. She lived in the U.K. for 10 years and currently reside in Rockport, Texas with her tuxedo cat, Jazz. More about Rebecah at the end of this section.
Deportee
​
I worked in the cotton fields
of New Mexico
beside grandma and Rosa.
I dragged that heavy canvas bag
from one row to the next
pulling cotton from sharp bolls
that cut like knives
through steak.
Rosa shared her
tortillas, rice, and beans
that were rolled tightly
and sealed in foil.
I shared my pbj.
And when we'd worked
from sunup to sundown,
Rosa slept in our cellar.
She said it was cooler down
there with the spiders
and other squiggly creatures
on an old army cot
that sagged slightly
and grandma would say,
sleep tight
and Rosa would laugh
like wind chimes in a breeze.
Rosa bought me gloves
to keep my hands from
bleeding on the cotton
and ruining it.
I bought her a crucifix
for Christmas.
One day, I stumbled from the
bus and walked in to
see my grandma
her face wracked in pain
tears streaming from her eyes
and sobs choking her words
that hovered in her throat.
They took Rosa
away somewhere
and said she could never return.
The absence of her
laughter and joy of life
haunts my vaulted heart
as I remember shared food,
small gloves and wind-chime laughter
​
Follow Mays Publishing
About Ricky Ginsburg
Ricky Ginsburg lives in Virginia. His writing portfolio consists of nearly 400 short stories, more than half of which have found their way into various magazines, both paper and electronic, and ten novels. MORE ABOUT RICKY AT THE END OF THIS SECTION
​
Iceland Comes to Florida
Redlining was the unspoken name for the process when Teddy Scarlucci’s father bought the house in the Bronx where the boy would lose his virginity. Gentrification took its place when Teddy retired, sold the house, and moved to Cocoa Beach, Florida five years ago. The forced sale, blamed entirely on the invasion of “rich, filthy a-rabs,” a phrase Teddy often shouted at his new neighbors, left the three-hundred pound former homicide detective with a bitter taste every time he uttered the words.
Pensions and Social Security aside, he could have lived out his life comfortably, but with his friends and relatives slurping at the constant flow of homebuyers who poured into his neighborhood, Teddy realized the futility of now being the square peg in a round hole. The final blow came with the closing of Tuttenello’s grocery and its replacement with a shop selling products that reminded Teddy of the bags of food they doled out in the zoo for little children to feed to the goats.
His escape to Florida, ahead of the invading hordes, was to be his last. He drew a line in the sand and dared anyone to cross it.
He wouldn’t have to wait long for a challenge.
In terms of Global Warming, the scientists weren’t even close. None of them, from the stodgy, cigar-smoking Nobel winner to the stuttering first year grad student, foresaw the unhitching of Iceland. No thesis ever published had predicted that the melting of polar ice from decades of rising sea temperatures and the sudden eruption of Mount Hekla would together rip the island nation from the Earth’s crust on the first day of summer. “Unhitching” was the word pounded into the public by the media, with the notable exception of the New York Times, which, in its disdain for the gerund, ran the two-inch headline “Unhitched” to describe an event never envisioned as a possible outcome of man’s rape of the planet.
The roar of granite and basalt–the very skin of the Earth–splintering into gravel, shattered windows on the tiny island nation and awakened everyone from London to Baffin Bay. In about the same time that it takes to properly fry sheep testicles, forty-thousand square miles of habitable land tore itself free and began bobbing and drifting in the North Atlantic, a life preserver of volcanic pumice keeping it afloat. Icebergs, too numerous to count, were spawned as the permafrost and glaciers collapsed into chunks large enough to pummel ships twice the size of the Titanic. Early reports, from the same group of embarrassed experts, predicted with pie-eyed certainty that it would sink. Yet after nearly a week had passed and the land mass remained afloat, a splinter group of doomsayers admitted to a hideous fear that it would collide with Scotland and possibly Ireland.
Fortunately for whiskey drinkers worldwide, the southbound currents of the Atlantic skidded the island several miles clear of both. However, seaside residents on the northern coast of Spain and Portugal evacuated several miles inland as Iceland headed in their direction. Yet, they too were spared, as it was now hurricane season and a series of tropical waves that spun off North Africa pushed the island clear and sent it on its final journey where it would come to rest–along the east coast of Florida.
The landing was more of a thud than a crash, as Iceland merged with the Florida seacoast after almost three months adrift. All of the beaches, from Boca Raton north to Jacksonville, disappeared as the peninsula and the island became one. Days prior to the arrival, local authorities had moved the entire coastal population a minimum of ten miles inland, fearing a possible tsunami. In addition, every available Customs agent and the entire US Border Patrol, who had been policing the Mexican and Canadian boundaries, were shipped via the Air Force to Florida to handle the expected influx of 320,000 Icelanders.
Orders from the White House came down to welcome the new arrivals, invoking the popular “Feet Dry” policy that had been used for Cubans for almost twenty years. The thought being that these folks might easily be convinced to vote on the side of the current administration in the next election.
However, the Icelanders had other plans.
Initially, these rugged descendants of hairy, dirty-knuckled Norsemen gave serious thought to attacking the United States and sealing the border between Georgia and Florida with a western boundary along the Apalachicola River just west of Tallahassee. The blood of conquerors and the burning taste of Brennivin, an alcoholic substitute for gasoline, gave birth to an undercurrent of lunacy under the sharp edge of the tropical sun. Armed with only ice picks, pitchforks, and a trio of unfueled British Harrier Jump-Jets, even the loudest of the catapult builders soon realized they were outgunned.
It was decided by the country’s President, who had spent the eighty-eight days at sea negotiating for polo shirts, tennis sneakers, and sunscreen, to simply ask for statehood, suggesting “Floraland”–a combination of the two–as a possible name.
A bit of fifth-grade geography here. Iceland had been a totally self-contained country, free of dependence on any other nation during most of its existence. Wind power, solar energy, and unlimited geothermal reserves along with pristine drinking water and nothing in the air to evoke a sneeze made it one of the most highly rated places to live, as long as one owned furs, mukluks, and woolly underwear. A friendly bunch, as long as you weren’t a male sheep, most of them spent their days relishing the lack of tourists, hoping for summer to be on a weekend that year, and smoking an abundance of local salmon.
During their trip south, however, the Icelanders passed through enough pollution and political hysteria to make them wish for the return of their frigid climate and angry volcanoes. The “not in my backyard” attitudes flung at them by Europeans they floated past was enough to make some of them grab paddles and head toward the shoreline to help keep their country away from the hostile mainland.
As luck would have it, the island–originally a monotonously flat heel on its southern shore and ruffled with the ragged fingers of several thousand mile-long fjords to the north–laid its smooth rump into the soft curve of the Florida coastline. Thus, the now east facing fjords–thawed, mostly barren, and well out into the warm waters of the Gulfstream–offered the possibility of many times the amount of expensive beachfront property than had previously existed.
Miami be damned, towns with too many vowels in their name were calling out to the European elite, the South American crazies, and every Saudi with a Gulfstream. There was now a South Beach two hundred miles long. Around the world, real estate developers began loading aircraft, cruise ships, and tour busses with prospective clients. The former island’s capital–Reykjavik, renamed RickyRicardo as an olive branch to Florida’s Hispanic population–spruced up its one-runway airport and offered employment with immediate benefits to anyone who could make a bed, clean a toilet, or deliver room service at three in the morning.
None of this, however, held any interest for Teddy Scarlucci and his fellow residents at Century Village, Cocoa Beach, Florida, located exactly sixty yards across a carefully manicured lawn and forty-seven feet of pure white sand that, until the arrival of the Icelanders, had been hand-raked daily. All of their precious oceanfront had been converted into lakeshore by the island and the protrusion of Cape Canaveral to the north. The water had become brackish, mud-filled, and quite the opposite of the idyllic setting the three hundred and two senior citizens had previously enjoyed in their years of blissful retirement. Add to that the constant military presence–convoys at all hours of the night rumbling down Ocean Avenue, fighter jets and helicopters flying so low that roof tiles had been falling–and they were beginning to think the last years of their lives were going to be spent in a war zone.
The emergency meeting of the village’s Board of Directors, the fifth one since the “invasion” as they’d come to call it, had started out with firearms training at the Sheriff’s office before moving across the street to the bingo hall.
Teddy, who had been elected last year for his fourth term as Board President, slammed his gavel another six times before the crowd was finally silenced. “This ain’t no good. This ain’t right. You know, we moved outta da Bronx ‘cause the neighborhood was changin’.” He turned to Reverend Aloysius Sampson, seated to his right, and shrugged. “No offense.”
Aloysius jiggled his hearing aid. “What?”
“I was just sayin’ these people gotta be sent back to Iceland.” Teddy pointed at a frail woman in a wheelchair in front of him loading nine-millimeter bullets into a clip. “And if we gotta be the ones that’s gonna send ‘em there, then so be it.”
From the back of the packed room, several cheers erupted along with the usual release of bodily gases from noses, mouths, and rectums. Someone dropped a shotgun they’d been waving in one hand and in the effort of bending over to retrieve it, fell into a row of seats, scattering handbags, switchblades, and brass knuckles as people tumbled from their chairs.
Aloysius, now properly amplified, stood and shook hands with Teddy, clasping him heartily on the back, and then collapsed into his seat, puffing on his inhaler several times.
“I mean, it’s bad enough we ain’t got no beach anymore. And not that I’m not patriotic or nuthin’ but these kids, these little punkass kids with uniforms and rifles and shit. That’s the US Army?” Teddy paused to catch his breath. “There ain’t no milk in Publix, you go into Costco or Sams and the shelves are empty, and if ya need to fill up your car? Fuggetabout it. Army’s got the pumps locked up.” Leaning over the podium, he held his hands out and shook them as though in prayer. “If this ain’t war, I ain’t Catholic!” He looked over at Aloysius and smiled. “No offense, Reverend.”
Aloysius nodded. “None taken.”
Sheriff Cragmorton, rapidly approaching retirement himself, and looking forward to his move to a ranch outside Fargo, North Dakota, and as far away as possible from these people he considered an annoyance until election time every three years, hoisted his bullhorn. “Safeties on folks! Make sure the safety is on!” There were several bullet holes in the ceiling tiles from past meetings where the crowd had been wound up like this. As much as he appreciated their zeal in removing this latest threat to his native stomping grounds, and for as little as he could do to stop them from procuring firearms in this gun-friendly state, the high chance of an accidental homicide and the resultant paperwork was his responsibility to prevent. He placed the bullhorn on the floor, leaned over, and whispered in Teddy’s ear, “Calm ‘em down or I’m turning off the air conditioning.”
“Hey, you got ‘em riled up wit the pistol range.” Teddy reached for the gavel, banging it several times to get the crowd’s attention. “Yo, check yer guns. Sheriff says to make sure the safety is on.” He cupped his hands and yelled toward a white-haired man wearing a torn, faded Beatles t-shirt, “Jackie, check Mrs. Nussbaum’s .45, willya?”
The meeting went on for another half-hour or so, complaints followed by threats, until the crowd realized “Jeopardy” was coming on, and then the seniors piled out of the bingo hall faster than kids running for the Good Humor truck. The Sheriff and two of his deputies collected an empty clip, four full ones, and a handful of loose bullets–everything from a .22 up to a fully jacketed 50-caliber machine gun round. Cragmorton dropped the huge bullet into a shirt pocket and buttoned it closed, shaking his head and counting the days until the end of the year.
Other than protecting themselves against these two groups of invaders, the next greatest concern to the residents of CVCB was a fresh supply of lox (smoked salmon, for the uncircumcised in the audience), a key element in their daily breakfast routine. This is not to say that bagels and cream cheese took secondary roles, but the former was considered a joke in Florida and the latter easily supplanted by either butter or margarine in a crisis. Even the standard bagel could be replaced by rye bread, whole wheat, or crackers, but for these former northeasterners, not the lox.
However, owing to its proximity to Cape Canaveral and its plethora of military hardware, Century Village and most of Cocoa Beach fell within an armed perimeter established by the Army to protect the government’s interests. None of the local supermarkets were prepared for the sudden influx of three thousand hungry soldiers, and thus the available food supply dwindled rapidly despite the best efforts of the military’s supply chain. Refrigerated trucks, loaded with fresh produce, were backed up halfway to the Georgia line, puffs of white smoke chugging away from their overtaxed freezers. Moreover, to the displeasure of the local citizenry, those that got through before their cargo spoiled were delegated to the young soldiers who had held them back in the first place.
Folks at CVCB had now been without lox for over a week and as most of the village’s inhabitants were retired New Yorkers like Teddy, where the morning bagel and lox was as traditional and required as the midday hot dog, the loss of this precious commodity was far worse than a hurricane. An impromptu meeting took place the following afternoon, just as the Early Bird Specials kicked in, at the Waffle House on Ocean Avenue by the Post Office.
Philomena Nussbaum marched her walker over to the cashier and punched the Off button on the restaurant’s background music, smiling at the teenager manning the register. “Teddy’s gonna talk, sweetie. And I can’t hear shit with all that noise!”
Teddy swiveled around from the counter, holding a sheath of pink and yellow shipping documents for all to see. “Line forty-seven, Lox–Nova Scotia, quantity: zero cases. Line forty-eight, Lox–Regular, quantity: zero cases.” He slammed the papers on the empty stool next to him. “That’s the last truck until Monday. What the hell is this? Are they tryin’ to starve us to death? Who’s more important–United States Americans or a buncha sheep herders and fishermen that are tryin’ to invade our country?”
There was a clattering of canes, walkers, and water glasses as those in the diner unleashed their agreement.
“Somethin’s gotta be done about these foreigners,” he continued, his voice growing dark, “before they run outta their own supplies and come lookin’ for ours.”
Several in the restaurant shouted “Amen!”
Reverend Sampson stood from a chair across from Teddy and turned to face the crowd. “Ain’t no prayer gonna solve this one, brothers and sisters.”
“Aloysius is right.” Teddy stood as well and walked over to put his arm around the preacher’s shoulder. “The time has come for action.”
Someone shouted from a corner, “What do you suggest?”
Teddy stepped back and leaned against the counter. “Tow the whole friggin’ island back out to sea and let the Gulf Stream take ‘em back where they came from.”
Mrs. Nussbaum clasped her hands together and winked at the cashier. “Oh goody, a boat ride!”
The Reverend turned toward Teddy and cocked his head to one side. “We ain’t got no boats. Whatcha talkin’ ‘bout?”
“No. We ain’t got the boats and even if we did, they’s too small to pull the entire island.” Teddy shook his head slowly and pointed out the window as a column of camo-beige Humvees roared past. “No. We ain’t got the boats, but they do.”
All eyes turned toward the window and stared at the soldiers.
“How you gonna get dem boats, Teddy?” Aloysius narrowed his gaze at the Village’s spokesman.
Teddy pulled a nickel-plated .44 magnum from the holster on his hip and held it up to where the sunlight glinted off the barrel. “With these.”
“You can’t be shootin’ no Army.” Aloysius looked up toward the ceiling. “For the love of God and all the Saints in Heaven.”
“I ain’t sayin’ we’re gonna shoot ‘em, Reverend.” Laying the heavy pistol on the counter, Teddy smiled at the group. “Hey, we’re just a buncha old folks, right? Buncha old, crazy New Yorkers. Don’t take no crap from nobody, right?”
A chorus of cheers rolled out in agreement. Someone yelled, “And you’re the craziest one of all, Scarlucci!”
Reverend Sampson stepped closer to Teddy and put his hand on his neighbor’s arm. “Just what do you propose, brother Scarlucci?”
Teddy looked at Mrs. Nussbaum and nodded. The old woman hobbled over and locked the doors of the diner, giving him thumbs up when it was done.
“No, we ain’t gonna shoot nobody, Reverend, but they don’t know that, do they? Teddy began pacing in front of the row of empty stools, his hands tucked into the back pockets of his Bermuda shorts. “First thing you learn on the streets is that there’s always one guy at the top. One guy who makes all the decisions.” He stopped and nodded at the group. “You find him,” he turned and smiled at Mrs. Nussbaum, “or her, and you can make things happen.”
“The President?” Aloysius blinked several times. “You want to go after the President?”
“Uh-huh.” Teddy nodded. “But not ours, theirs.” He slapped the counter, awakening a bald man in a Yankees t-shirt sitting closest to him. “These bastards invaded us, now we’re gonna invade them back.”
Aloysius coughed several times, pulling his inhaler from his pocket but pausing as his breath came back. “You wants to invade Iceland?”
Teddy smiled. “Yep. And take their President hostage until the Army pulls the freakin’ island back out to sea.”
“And how do you propose to get him?” Aloysius wheezed.
“We don’t have to get him, Reverend.” Teddy strode triumphantly over to the newsstand and pulled the morning edition of the Cocoa Beach Tattler from the rack. Holding it out in front of his chest, he panned the newspaper around the diner and announced, “He’s coming here.”
President Gustafson of Iceland had heard the rumblings from the displaced citizens of his newly acquired neighborhood and as an offering of peace had announced plans the previous afternoon to visit several of the former beachfront communities in the hopes of interesting them to relocate further east where they could once again dip their toes in the Atlantic Ocean. In addition, he planned to spend the following afternoon at Cape Canaveral to see if NASA could be persuaded to move its launch pads to the tip of one of Iceland’s largest peninsulas. He would be passing through Cocoa Beach just in time for Happy Hour.
Teddy’s plan involved a pair of car crashes–his 2003 Cadillac would be the first of the sacrificial lambs, colliding with President Gustafson’s limo at the point on Ocean Avenue where the railroad crossed the four-lane highway. The second would be Mrs. Nussbaum’s Oldsmobile, as long as they could get the car started after several years under a tarp in her driveway. As an alternative, one of the other CVCB residents had a three-wheeled bicycle with a large basket on the front that the man insisted he would give them, as long as it could later be repaired.
With the President’s car isolated from its military escort, Teddy and three of the younger seniors would rush the limousine and spirit their enemy away in a rented Camry to a large cabana on the north side of the shuffleboard courts. They figured that without a clicker for the security gate, there was no way the Army or any of the foreigners could get into the village fast enough to follow them. A ransom note would be left in the glovebox of the Cadillac, demanding that the Army remove the invading island within two days or the President would be fed to a large alligator–one finger at a time.
As it turned out, the plan was flawed in several areas that the seniors failed to consider. The presence of the Secret Service, trained at protecting foreign dignitaries, and dealing with angry senior citizens, squashed the attack while the residents were still putting on camouflage makeup from the local Army/Navy store in the Waffle House parking lot. Philomena Nussbaum’s Oldsmobile had started up just fine but ran out of gas two blocks from Ocean Avenue and the oversized tricycle had two flat tires, neither of which was a size they could find in Sports Authority.
Teddy and his gang of gum-grinders found themselves face down on the asphalt, their weapons confiscated, and the keys to his Caddy in Sheriff Cragmorton’s pocket before the motorcade had left the hotel.
Yet a bit of luck was still in their favor. As the President’s limo crossed the railroad tracks, a loose pin from one of the rails spun up with the front right tire and sliced the belt running the vehicle’s air conditioner. The motorcade pulled into Waffle House from the front just as the Secret Service was escorting their prisoners in through the kitchen. They met at the counter.
President Gustafson peered around his bodyguard and pointed at the seniors. “Who are these old men? Do they live here?”
“Yeah, we live here and we want our lox!” Teddy shouted before the agent holding him was able to pull him back into the kitchen.
“Wait!” the President stepped around the towering guard and walked up to the counter. “What does he want? Let me hear.”
Holding Teddy’s arms behind his back, the Secret Service agent paused with his prisoner in the swinging doors to the kitchen. “These men were going to kidnap you, Mr. President. I think you should step back.”
“Kidnap me?” the President laughed. “For what?”
“For lox, Mr. President.” Teddy strained against the agent’s grip and managed to point a shoulder in the direction of the daily special board with its full-color photo of the $2.99 bagel and lox platter. “You invaded our country and took away our lox.”
The President walked over to the photo and put on his glasses to read the text before turning to face Teddy again. “This is salmon?”
“Yeah, smoked.”
“And you call it ‘lox’?”
“Yeah.”
Laughing, President Gustafson turned toward his group of aides and said something in his native tongue. The group and the bodyguard quickly joined in the merriment, pointing at Teddy and his compatriots and laughing even harder.
“Hey! What’s so funny?” Teddy nodded toward the President.
“We call it ‘gravlox’ and if you want some, we have far more than we can eat.” Gustafson chuckled, “I would not have ever expected to be kidnapped for some fish. But this is America.” He smiled. “Land of opportunity, yes?”
Teddy shrugged. “How much you got?”
President Gustafson rubbed his chin and looked up at the ceiling for a moment, then turned and smiled at the old man. “It depends on how much you’re willing to pay, yes?”
“And what about the invasion?”
With a snort, Iceland’s lead sled dog nodded, pointing at Teddy’s cohorts. “You say that as though we are here willingly.”
“Shit, everyone from up north ends up in Florida eventually.” Teddy shook himself loose from the Agent and took a seat at the counter. “I never thought I’d be here and now I’m so wrapped up in the day-to-day workins of this place that I can’t imagine livin’ nowheres else. And then you guys come along and screw up all I got left.” He frowned, closing one eye and targeting the President as though looking through some invisible riflescope. “And you ain’t even rich, filthy a-rabs. You’re a whole new sorta problem that’s gotta get dealt with.”
“You need to look at this with both eyes, my friend.”
“How so?”
The President walked over and sat down next to Teddy. There was a long pause, as the words gathered in the elder statesman’s thoughts. Moreover, when he began to speak, it was with more the oratory than the friendly tone Teddy expected. “Your perception is jaded by an unjustified animosity, bred by incipient fear, toward the unknown. Look at your ‘lox’ problem and how simply this unknown invader was able to solve it for you. Is that the mark of an enemy? Is that the action of one who seeks to do you harm? Of course it’s not. Even the dullest amongst us can reach that conclusion.”
He paused again, holding his hand up in front of Teddy’s face, while he seemed to be searching for either an ending or the link to a much larger debate. With a nod to himself, President Gustafson continued, “Some force of nature, with much help from the global community, brought us here, not money, not the desire to leave the environment we’ve enjoyed since the beginning of time.”
“And so we’re stuck with you.”
“And we with you.”
Reverend Sampson shouted from where he was being held just inside the kitchen, “Ask him about the boats!”
With a puzzled look on his face, the President asked, “Boats?”
“Yeah. We figure if the Navy hooks up to your island they can tow it back out to sea, catch the Gulf Stream, and send you home.” Teddy smiled. “And we get our beach back and everyone’s happy again.”
The Icelandic commander-in-chief said nothing for several seconds, although it was obvious from his smile, the faint tears, and the rapid shaking of his head that he was doing everything in his power to hold back nearly uncontrollable laughter. He turned toward his aides and translated Teddy’s suggestion, breaking into a coughing series of guffaws along with his countrymen.
He was about to respond to Teddy’s comments when, from a short distance away, came a sound similar to bones crushing, but loud enough that they could have been from a pile of castrated sheep carcasses. The Waffle House shook, several glasses fell from the shelves behind the counter and the daily specials board collapsed sending a cloud of dust into the middle of the floor.
Moments later, air raid sirens, unused since the Cuban Missile Crisis erupted in a blaring song and everyone turned toward the former coastline, staring in wonder. Radios in the pockets of the Secret Service Agents burst into undistinguishable chatter and within a few seconds, all of the Agents bolted from the Waffle House, heading with a now growing crowd in a stampede to the east.
Sheriff Cragmorton pulled up to the Waffle House and rushed in through the door. “It’s sinking!” he shouted, “The island is sinking!”
“What? How?” President Gustafson grabbed the Sheriff and shook him as though the answers would fall out of the man’s pocket. “What the hell are you saying?”
“It came over the radio about ten minutes ago. All that new construction. All those people, tens of thousands of them. Aircraft, trucks.” He shook his head. “It was just too much weight for the land mass to handle. Iceland is sinking into the Atlantic and pulling away from the shoreline. They’re saying it’s going to float into the Gulf Stream.” The Sheriff grinned. “Headed north.”
Teddy shifted his bulk off the seat at the counter and laughed, nearly popping a lung with a cough that brought up a jellybean-sized chunk of phlegm. Catching his breath, he slapped both palms on the counter. “Hey Prez, there’s a great neighborhood in the Bronx that could use a change. Sounds like yer headed that way. Good schools, lottsa great restaurants, and you can get a real bagel and lox, fresh, every day. Cheap.” He held his arms out to the Sheriff so the handcuffs could be removed, before walking over to President Gustafson and putting his arm around the man’s shoulder, the sound of a happy farewell in his voice, “Tell ‘em Teddy sent ya. Tell ‘em he’s livin’ on a nice, sunny beach in Florida and there ain’t no room for nobody else.”
About Ricky Ginsburg
Ricky Ginsburg is one of those writers who sees a flock of birds heading south for the winter and wonders what they talk about on their journey. His portfolio consists of nearly 400 short stories, more than half of which have found their way into various magazines, both paper and electronic, and ten novels, four by Black Rose Writing and the rest self-published. While much of his writing has elements of magical realism and humor, he also has a serious side, but keeps it in a small plexiglass box under his desk.
​
Follow Mays Publishing
About Roberta Dohse
Roberta Shellum Dohse practiced law in Corpus Christi for many years. She has always loved to write.
​
Montevideo
​
I once read a book about a woman who ran away from her life,
changing her name to that of towns through which she passed,
names so unique and different
that no one would think them the name of a woman.
She cut free her tethers and floated into a new world.
There are still times when I wish to pull up stakes, leaving behind all that is
known.
I still thirst for new challenges, new mountains,
different faces of the sun.
What am I searching for?
At those times the moments appear like facets in a gem,
turned one way and the familiar stares back,
turned another and the unknown glints in the light so enticingly,
luring me with possibility.
Those moments last only so long as the light refracts just so,
but an urgency still remains and presses on me
to change the air I breathe, the job that I do,
the routine of my life.
I want to see a different mountain, listen to a different sea.
So I dream. But they are waking dreams.
My restlessness is strong.
And though my wandering is a poor substitute, it helps slake my thirst
when I watch the sun rise, or set, on a different sea,
taste the salt in the air and smell the pines.
There is a respite as I breathe in heather and lilacs,
new rain on freshly turned earth
leather being worked into scabbards
and iron being forged,
melted wax being formed into candles,
alfalfa in the fields and dust on the wind.
I grow herbs and imagine I am of a different age in the gardens of a castle.
And, sometimes, I linger at the faint strums of a guitar and think of you
and wish I did not have to wander just to catch a hint of your
passing.
Bittersweet
​
The old tree where you first pulled down a branch
to pluck me a sweet blossom,
where you first gazed so deeply into my eyes,
it is leaning so wearily into the wind.
The old gas pump is still standing at the edge of town,
though the station is now long abandoned.
It was there you first put your hands on my shoulders
and drew me close, just to smell my hair.
And just up the hill is the old barn
where we had our first dance,
swaying so slowly to the rhythm of the band.
I still remember the deep musky smell of you.
There is music! And despite my best intentions,
I am drawn in to gaze at the big dance floor,
at the band at the far end, up on the stage,
just getting started.
People filter in to sit at the rough wooden tables,
laughing, talking,
and I lose myself in the lively tunes.
I can almost taste the beer.
A smile steals across my lips.
Then a loud commotion erupts at the door,
and you burst in,
your bigger-than-life laugh filling this space.
You move through,
greeting old friends, eyes sparkling,
legs twitching with the pulsing rhythm.
The very air has come alive.
But you are not with me,
and the tears spill unbidden from my eyes.
I stifle my sobs, fade back into the shadows,
then out into the twilight.
Still, I cannot keep from looking back as I drift
slowly down the hill, and,
like Lot’s wife, I am rooted to the spot.
The last rays of the setting sun
arc through the gaps in the walls,
through the places where the roof has crumbled,
where moss and leaves have tumbled in.
And, with a great a flutter of wings,
a covey of dove bursts out into the cooling air.
Shadow and color mingle, and glitter in my tears.
When am I and where are you, my love?
copyright Roberta Dohse
​
Follow Mays Publishing
Robin Carstensen is the Poet Laureate of Corpus Christi. She directs the creative writing program at Texas A&M University-CC.
​
PRIZE FIGHTER: 101 VARIATIONS ON A THEME
​
No. 15
Dear Search Committee for English Faculty at Midwest Prairie University:
I am a swinger. I can swing from one vine to another all day long, on and on. I am the tree and the vine. I will bend, but not break. I am the sky and the range, and the deer on the range where the antelope play and seldom is heard a discouraging word, and if so it won’t be from me, because I am a “we,” and there is no I in team.
No. 27
Dear Search Committee for English Faculty at the University of King Rooster Ranch and Possibly Eden:
My sweet nectar will feed your shimmering green student hummingbirds, while I serve free-range chickens to the faculty from my own feathered flock that I raise, slaughter, and defeather single-handedly. I can assure you with the highest confidence, I am an ace in the hole, and you would be an ass in the hole not to hire me.
No. 53
Dear Lords of the Upper Echelons of English and Lost Humanities at the University of Cheese:
You might want to hire a poet to teach that poetry class listed at the bottom of your course guide in Baskerville Old Face font, size 8. Looks like the lit prof, who teaches it now has no poetry publications in print, cyberspace, or on any planet in our galaxy, though she did write an essay twenty years ago published in the Daily Moo. While I don’t mean to milk its provincialism, I am compelled to question the Moo’s peer-review process. More importantly though, you could have saved us all a lot of trouble by encoding something in your job posting about the insider you intended to hire regardless of 363 applications. Solution: next time, insert the word “moo” after minimum qualifications, as in “must have experience with exploitative for-profit online universities, and be able to moo well.”
No. 69
Dear Search Committee of the Tabernacle of the Most Holy and Some Polygamy Here and There of Red Earth Canyon:
I really wish you would not have teased me by insinuating that you were seeking to become more open, affirming, and diverse. If I had known you were deeply entrenched in the Most Holy of Red Earth Canyon and Some Polygamy Here and There Culture, I would have had a different notion of open and affirming. For starters, I would not have brought in Judith Ortiz Cofer’s “The Changeling” for my teaching demonstration, and asked you to break into groups and act out each stanza. While I think your Chair did a fine job performing the young girl who plays the warrior with her father, I think the Director of Composition could have put forth a little more effort as the mother who feverishly braids her daughter’s hair and forbids her to hang out with the boys again. She was supposed to follow my script and emphatically demand, “Be sweet, damnit!” I feel she was not very enthusiastic about her role and therefore didn’t adequately convey the subtle nuances of gender construction. On the up side, I got to play poker with the big boys on my way back home through Sin City. I mean to say these were real men, studs with cigars and whiskey, up all night. Not you wussy willow boys from The Tabernacle of the Most Holy and Some Polygamy Here and There on Red Earth Canyon.
No. 77
Dear Gulf Coast Breeze Community College with No Journal, Not Even an Undergrad Vanity E-Zine with Misogynist Comic Strips:
I’m accustomed to the humidity that slaps onto one’s skin and coagulates one’s hair into a Brillo pad. I can stick through hell and high water like flies on shit, like shine on Shinola. I have a small RV, will travel. Well, okay, it’s one of those pop-ups. I can set up camp anywhere in a flash. You’ve got swell beaches, and I’ll have students and faculty over for poetry nights and weenie roasts. And I don’t mean “weenie roast” in any subterfuge of male bashing, so no worries! I’ll even pitch in the Boone’s Farm. “Oh, the places we’ll go, the things we’ll do.”
No. 81
Dear Enchanted Castle Northeast, Up with the Picture Perfect Postcards of Autumn in the Trees, for the English job posted two weeks ago, indicating Position Open Until Filled:
I’ve been around the block a few times, so trust me, I can fill your position like the fourth of July. I’ve been on Skype and campus interviews for the past thirteen months, and I can assure you I have the flexibility and the wide-open range and depth to not only fill your position but overflow it. I am the position.
No. 85
Dear Reverend of the Search Committee for English Faculty at Big Moose Small Liberal Arts Catholic University and Sisters of Providence Somewhere Near Brokeback Mountain:
It felt weird to say “father” to someone who isn’t my father; it’s like I was in the confessional booth forced to say “daddy” to a BDSM who wants to top, so I was taken slightly aback when trying to leave that voicemail inquiry. I also realized my feminist dissertation would probably not lend itself hugely to me making the phone interview cut, but you should know I was cutting you some major slack despite the recent press biz about the bishops cracking the whip on abortion and birth control. I regret my willingness to sacrifice my principles for a job, but the thought of meeting the Sisters of Providence was tempting. I confess wondering how much versatility lingered beneath those providential habits—the quantum potentials of a Sister and I becoming enrapt in one another on a fine Spring day, frolicking in the lilies and The Lucy Poems. I should clarify I was actually saying Take me, take me to the sisters when I left that whispery message on your phone.
No. 99
Dear Pizza Hut Night Shift Manager:
I know, I know. I locked myself out of the car during the delivery-driver orientation, with ten pizzas stacked inside on the passenger seat, and the engine running, and I apologize; but to be fair, your nephew distracted me by repeatedly rubbing his crotch and staring at my breasts while we were getting lost in the maze of cul-de-sacs and dead-ends down by Laguna Reef and the Volunteer Fire Station, and I had to get out before his pants caught on fire. Thankfully, one of the firemen came out to help. After putting your nephew out, we took swift action and found an old license plate in the bed of the truck to jimmy open the car door latch. I know we took some poetic license, but you have to admit we showed innovation under pressure what with two engines running hot, and the pizza going cold and lard-hard as well…. not someone’s mama.
No. 101
Dear Search Chair on Humanity’s Last Lost Horizon:
You can take the dog out of the fight, but you can’t take the fight out of the dog. I’m four years in and 121 rejections later on a book of poems that could break your ribs (which is what I want to do to the editors every time some young chump barely 21 years of age gets a book published like he’s got something to say on the planet). I’m tougher than Tungsten Carbide, baby. I can bounce back up like a Jack-in-the-Box. You don’t even have to wind me up. You’ll just be walking by one day, minding your biz, and bang. I’ll pop up, and you’ll screech. I’ll laugh so hard I’ll pee in my pants (getting to that age now, what with not doing my Kegels), and then you’ll laugh too, because sometimes it really is the best medicine, isn’t it; and we’ll be ROFL, honey, which I’ll bet my cheese puffs is the best response to the wild call from every form of capsized humanity, SOS, SOS, SOS…..!!
​
Hard Core (originally published in Zócalo Public Square)
​
Even the minimalist drinks beer, though he lives alone in a modest place
and walks everywhere. Sits on the floor with Rumi and a frying pan
with couscous. He touches himself to the rhythm of pixels on a screen;
contemplates the mystery of a bulb, red and yellow flame of Semper
Augustus streaming down his face. A wasp is crawling on the ceiling,
lost among plaster stalactites. He perceives it has taken a wrong turn, opens
the window for the breeze to draw it out, watches it regain a sense of bearing
and fly home. He writes new song as the high bard, prays for the whole world
to listen and not come home empty and grieving at the hour of their death.
He also rents Gag Factor, one through ten, stares, unblinking, at Asian
spice and honey blondes fresh off the bus from Winnipeg, their mouths
pulled open wide for communion—his one offering of faith in free enterprise.
​
Breaking Point
​
Beyond the Buena Vida Senior Village
sprawled across the old grain field,
your cloud nearly touches his hovering
over the desk, where you’ve both made it
after all to this last office down the hall,
far end of Del Mar West, the outreach campus—
edge of the oil refinery city, South Texas
Gulf Coast, where you finally finished
your own heavy lifting, defended
your dissertation after playing medic,
dishwasher, short-order cook, pizza-hut
deliverer, now trying to catch a new
break, he lifts his draft—essay one—
above the shaft of afternoon dust,
gauzy thick like revision-talk for making
clear and academically sound his life
on the industrial edge, the drug lords
who track him to every address,
tempt him with rolls of bills—favor
for his father and brother behind
Beeville’s bars, whose sealed mouths
and flared eyes command him to stay
his course. The vapor from their locked-in
dreams beating like the Royal Tern’s
wings heavy with metal residue
lifting against the chemical sky
has gathered in the atmosphere
of his face and yours when you look
into the large, black shades that veil
his eyes, you freeze, hear the distant
pierce of an engine’s gullet full-throttling
down Old Brownsville Road, or urgent
call of gull. The sound is closing in,
and now it strikes you—here, escaping
his throat. His brick shoulders shake,
his lips are wet, and the issue at stake
is cracking the surface, beyond the point
of saturation, his life, and yours, dark
chambers in the cold room about to break.
​
Follow Mays Publishing
Robin Chanin
​
Memories of Woodstock
​
I was 17 years old in the summer of 1969, when I announced to my parents that I was going to upstate New York to a three-day music festival. They looked at me like I was crazy. They said "oh really, and how do you plan to get there?" I told them I would hitchhike if I had to, but I was definitely going. I whined about it. I got my twin brother Michael and my younger sister Lynn to whine about it. My mother reminds me that I was the ringleader and instigator. I had roused my siblings to the cause, and we all wanted to go to Woodstock. Our teenage mantra was that we would get there any way we could. We had seen the poster. We heard about it from everyone we talked to. The festival's energy was simply omnipresent in our world. My parents relented but only on one condition, if our 20 year old brother Marc, who was home from college would drive us in his fine 1967 Ford Galaxy 500 convertible. My mother tells me now that she gave him her credit card and cash to encourage him to take us. She even paid for the gas. So, he agreed to chaperone and chauffeur us, and our high school buddy Susan, to the celebration of peace and music: Woodstock.
We borrowed sleeping bags from our neighbors. We didn't even have backpacks so we didn't pack a thing with us. No food, no change of clothes. We were kids from suburban Fords, New Jersey, who had never camped out in our lives. Despite being seasoned anti-war protesters, open-air music concerts was out of our ken. We brought an extra blanket, like we were going to a picnic, loaded ourselves into the car and drove the 125 miles upstate to a show we didn't have tickets for. I think we must have assumed that we would buy tickets at the gate. It all seemed very reasonable to a 17 year old.
The ride was uneventful until we arrived fairly close to the site on Friday afternoon. Suddenly there were cars and people everywhere. Everyone looked just like us. My older brother told me that that's what he remembers most about Woodstock, how it was a great equalizer. No one stood out. There was a moving sea of blue jeans and flowing hair, beads, embroidery and flowers. We just parked our car in a field of other cars and joined the throngs. We didn't even have to know where the event was being held exactly, the movement simply took us there. We had heard in the crowd that the fences were down and people were being allowed in for free. That worked for us. We were going to Woodstock and we didn't even need tickets anymore!
A sea of people spread before us in the largest crowd of humanity we had ever seen amassed in one place. There was a stage in the distance, and smoke was rising from pipes and joints. Everyone smiled at each other like we were all members of the same lost tribe, now rejoined. There was camaraderie, a likeness of spirit. It reminded me of Walt Whitman's: And what I assume, you shall assume; For every atom belonging to me, as good belongs to you."
I remember listening to the music of Ravi Shankar, Arlo Guthrie, Joan Baez. Darkness fell to their sounds on Friday night. People came and went. Joints were passed around. Someone gave us amyl nitrate. The world inverted and then righted itself. The rain started. We moved our wet sleeping bags closer to the stage. The rain continued. We were part of the sea of people.
I don't remember sleeping, but soon it was Saturday morning.
I have to admit I don't remember much else. My older brother left us for several hours in search of food. That was some time on Saturday. I do recall that he showed up with a dozen hamburgers and a good-sized box of big soft pretzels that someone had given him on the side of the road. We shared the bounty with our neighbors. Lynn, Susan, and I walked to the port-a-potties. There were tables set up where event organizers were handing out information; there was food somewhere; there was a makeshift medical tent. I don't know how we found our way back to our family and our little square patch of place, everything looked the same in every direction, but we did. I remember feeling safe everywhere we went.
It occurred to us, though, we were completely unprepared to stay. We were in the same clothes from the day before. We had spent the night outside unprotected from the elements. We were cold, and we had no way to change our situation. So, we decided to leave. One of our neighbors was handing out acid. My siblings and I didn't indulge, but Susan did. She opened her mouth, and he tossed in a tab. Just like that. We headed back to the car, found it and headed south on the New York Thruway. By then It was late Saturday afternoon.
Exhaustion does not begin to describe the state we were in. Giddy and hungry, we talked and dozed. We pulled off on to the thruway shoulder and slept, with the top down. Susan was still tripping away. She sat on the top of the back seat and watched the sky change colors. She told us that while we slept she had walked into the field of cows we had parked next to and had communed and communicated with them. It's very likely that's exactly what happened. We had just come from Woodstock. We knew anything was possible.
If I had to summarize those 24 hours we spent at Woodstock, I would say that we did not hear much of the music, but we celebrated with a half million other people the first festival of peace.
​
Ginsberg, Burroughs, Ferlinghetti
I love being reminded of Allen Ginsberg's poems. I had the wonderful good fortune to cross paths with him in 1982 in Boulder, Colorado. I volunteered at Naropa Institute where he was teaching a poetry course. I did a summer poetry apprenticeship with him and would go to his house to help him with all kinds of stuff. He had an old file cabinet with a giant folder in it called "Faded Yellow Newspaper Clippings" that I would add to on a regular basis. It was the summer of the Kerouac Conference celebrating the 25th anniversary of the publication of On The Road. All the old Beat poets and writers were there. I was the volunteer coordinator for that week-long event. One of most favorite summers of my lifetime.
Here's another anecdote from the 1982 era. For some reason I had William Burroughs in the back of my car driving him somewhere. He had a companion with him, but I can't remember who. Burroughs said in his very strange voice, "I want to stop and get some strawberries." The way he said strawberries sounded so bizarre, I never forgot it. Many many years later on the the campus at UC Santa Cruz, the library had just gotten many works by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. He was on campus to celebrate. I was coming out of the library for a completely unrelated reason and saw him walking up the steps. I had to stop and ask, "Are you Lawrence Ferlinghetti?" He said, "Yes, I am." I said I was the volunteer coordinator at the Kerouace Conference at Naropa in 1982." He looked at me and his eyes twinkled with happiness. He said "Oh that was a time...that was quite a time."
​
Follow Mays Publishing
About Roger Lawrence
​
Roger Lawrence lives in Corpus Christi. He founded the Navy Office of General Counsel for the Chief of Naval Air Training Command. In that capacity he represented the Blue Angels and the National Museum of Naval Aviation. As a sailor, he earned a Coast Guard rescue. He is barred from every golf course in South Texas.
​
Rattlesnake Christmas
​
The December cold fronts this year have forced small rodents to seek the warmth of our garages and yards in the Garden Court subdivision of Corpus Christi, Texas. We’re a small, gated community on a half-street adjacent to a swath of coastal marshland along the Oso Creek estuary. For our rodent neighbors, Garden Court is a welcoming refuge area that is just a short march from the marshy bottoms.
After another wet cold front blew through last night, I was up at first light to inspect a trap for mice on the track at the bottom of my garage door. Instead of a mouse, a triangular head popped up with its midsection caught in the trap. I froze. The eyes were slit. Gray-brown diamonds interlaced on its back, and its bobbing black tail was interspersed with silver racoon-rings. A rattlesnake. My instinctive reaction was both quickened heartbeats and breathing. I then felt the hot fear on my skin that if anything went wrong—the snake got loose, struck me, his fangs found a blood vessel, delays getting to hospital, the vaccine was not in stock, or I was allergic to the vaccine—if any of this happened, this snake could make me miserable, and, maybe, dead.
I resolved to strike first. After all, I had a collie puppy to protect.
I would be in good company. The residents of Garden Court see themselves as living in an unremitting siege from snakes seeking moisture from our sprinklers in times of drought, high ground in floods, or the warmth of our sun-bathed concrete driveways when the weather turns cold. A week ago, a retired policeman shot a six-foot rattlesnake on the green walkway behind our homes with a 12-gauge (which, being within city limits, was not strictly legal). He was miffed that the shot ruined the snake meat. Two days ago, a buzz-cut Marine Ready Reservist hoed the head off a rattlesnake his wife flushed out while tending her roses. She was alerted as the off-white rattle on the snake’s tail poked up through the leaves and the snake hissed, sounding like air escaping a tire—as she later recounted to my wife, who subsequently began watering her roses from afar with an outstretched hose.
But standing wedged between the trunk of my car and the garage door, I realized that none of these instinctive first-strike strategies would work in the tight confines of my overstuffed garage. After giving my mortal enemy a closer look, I realized that he was only about 14 inches long—a baby that hadn’t yet grown a rattle for his tail. Given his size, he couldn’t coil and strike any longer than two–thirds of his length, at least, if I recalled the warning to hikers from the National Park Service correctly. I decided to scoop him out, still in the trap, with a spade. But even so, if anything went wrong he was still venomous and potentially as lethal as his elders. As I shoveled up the pint-sized poisonous snake, he writhed, coiled, and struck at me. No doubt from his perspective, I was a hulking Satan with the mythical pitchfork in my hand. He struck nothing but the cold air between us. In less than a minute, his rapid-fire strikes faded, and he rested his head in the spade. His airy bites dissolved into lazy yawning.
The yawns threw me off my game. Despite the constant reminder of his fangs to keep my spade fully extended from my feet and legs, I brought the snake toward me to have a closer look. I then realized that my prisoner’s status had changed from lethal insurgent to exhausted infant. My initial plan to summarily execute him, in the rodent graveyard in the yellow grass beyond the reach of the sprinkler, was no longer a valid emergency response. I decided instead, to execute him in the marsh whence he came. I knew my wife would favor my forced march down to the marsh bottoms. Removing all traces of the snake from the yard would allow her to back down from her own emergency watering protocol. Besides, I told myself, the snake, as a hunter, deserves a separate burial ground from his prey.
Wielding the spade with my prisoner in front of me, I hiked two hundred yards out my back gate and down to the coastal marsh grasslands to the execution site along the Oso Creek estuary. Once there, I noticed that the rain from the fronts had turned the grasses into a spongy, musty, tan-gray mat that threatened to deflect the strike of my blade, staying the execution.
When I reached the execution site, the foundling stopped yawning, too fatigued to extend his forked tongue. He made sideways caterpillar movements head to tail. I loosened my death grip on the handle, and reverting to my former persona as a military prosecutor, rendered his sentence: Little serpent, your kind are not compatible to live side by side with humans in their habitat. You are, however, found NOT GUILTY of constituting a clear and present danger to Garden Court. You entered without malice, with the sole intent to seek warmth and food in the form of refugee mice. I release you back to Mother Marsh—incubator of reptiles, fish, fowl, grazing mammals, scavengers, live oaks, and the grasses of costal south Texas. I planted one foot, and with the other gingerly freed his tail from the trap, and slid him off the spade. As I stood motionless over the freed and quivering snake, the memory cells of my rattled brain then recalled another statistical caution to hikers—most venomous snakebites are caused by victims trying to kill the snake.
The little guy disappeared through a bunch of switchgrass, the only bunch still hardy and glowing green on the marsh. But I knew that this singularity of switchgrass was not long to survive alone and green on the cold marsh bottoms, and so I made a contract with Mother Marsh: You will nurture the infant snake back to health; whereas I will take her sacrifice of the endangered green switchgrass, with my spade, on the condition that I preserve it through the coldest days of the year.
That same evening, I assembled our tree of wire and green-dyed bristles in preparation for the observance of Christmas. I transplanted the clump of withering, but still green switchgrass, in a flowerpot and placed it at the base of the tree. Mother Marsh’s spring-green blades graced our home with the promise of warmer days for Garden Court, and a thaw of hostilities with our neighbors on the marsh. You can’t kill every rattlesnake in Texas.
​
Follow Mays Publishing
About Ron George
Ron George retired in 2015 from Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi as a research development officer. He is a former journalist and retired presbyter of The Episcopal Church. His newspaper stints include The Corpus Christi Caller-Times, The Dallas Morning News and The Houston Chronicle. He was an instructor in the Journalism Department at Texas A&M University in College Station and news adviser for The Battalion student newspaper from 1999 to 2006. A 1965 graduate of Texas Christian University (BA, Journalism), George holds a Master of Divinity degree (cum laude) from Nashotah House Theological seminary (1976) and a Doctor of Ministry degree from Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary (2009). In retirement, he writes for pleasure at https://pelicandiaries.wordpress.com/.
The Tomb Cutter
His family had been stonecutters for generations. His father and grandfather worked all their lives on the great Temple in Jerusalem. He was born in the city of David, almost in the shadow of Herod’s great work as it rose above the Kidron Valley. Previous generations of his family had been itinerant craftsmen, ranging as far north as the Galilee and across the Jordan River valley. They were a proud, talented clan, and the gleaming cities they left behind were their legacy.
They were Jews and spoke the common tongue of Palestine but also Greek, for it was the language of trade. There hadn’t been much need for it in his time, but grandfather always insisted that the family keep its Greek, even after more than 40 years of living in mountainous Judah. You can speak Greek to the ends of the earth, he used to say; and someday, you may have to go there to make a living.
He had no yen to travel, though. Jerusalem was home, the center of his world, his life. Now his children were learning his craft and trade; and soon, he would be the grandfather of his family. Thirty years of life, most of them in quarries and climbing construction scaffolding, had left their mark, but he was glad to have lived so long. Many of his generation had not. He no longer scaled quarry ladders, but neither had he quit working. He was a tomb cutter, one of the best. The pay was good for an old man, but best of all, his feet never left the ground. He had seen too many of his old friends end their days falling from where they had climbed to put finishing touches on high stone. Some regarded tomb cutting as unclean. There was nothing unclean about a new tomb, though, which he was weary of explaining to neighbors.
His clients were wealthy and had taken to the burial practice of cutting family tombs into limestone with enough space to lay out a corpse and then store the bones in niches in the walls or floor after the flesh had totally decayed. Thousands of such tombs in Jerusalem were filled with bone-boxes inscribed with the names of the dead. Every handbreadth of space was used for storing the bones before a new tomb was cut. Hiring a tomb cutter, especially the best, was expensive.
He had cut large and small tombs, always with a ledge for laying out the corpse. He took great care in making the tomb seem more like the room of house than a hole in the side of a hill. Most tomb cutters did no more than this, and of course, their prices were lower. He had spent too many years, however, carefully measuring and measuring again before making just the right cut.
It was a hallmark of his work that his tombs were secure, ingeniously engineered to make it impossible for grave robbers to steal whatever was precious in the bone boxes. Once the custom-cut stone, shaped like a globe, was rolled into place, it took special tools to move it. He was not only the cutter of tombs but the opener as well for those he made, which was another reason his prices were high.
He had for some weeks worked on a modest tomb for a member of the Council from Arimathea. It wasn’t far outside the northern wall of the city, between roads leading from the Fish and Sheep gates on the way to Samaria. Nearby, a putrescent waste dump fouled the air, the Place of the Skull, so called for all the rotting animal carcasses and even human remains. Beggars’ corpses were dumped there—and criminals’, especially of those crucified on that foul heap. He detested the tomb site. He’d almost turned down the work, but the Arimathean was persuasive—and paid a little more. He’d finished the tomb just a week before Passover.
The holiday was relatively uneventful, which is not to say the city was calm. While tens of thousands of pilgrims thronged upper city streets and the Temple precincts, his family crowded into his house in the lower city to commemorate Passover with the traditional meal. Permanent residents of Jerusalem had learned to stay home when pilgrims jammed the streets. They had stored extra food and provisions for weeks before the holiday. His sons had secured the lamb and had it duly sacrificed, but everyone else stayed far from the Temple. They would pay their respects some other time.
As usual, the family remained together through Passover night, all sleeping in the tomb cutter’s modest house. They would stay together through the Sabbath, which began at sundown the next day. An unspoken prayer churned in everyone’s breast: Let there be no riots this year.
There weren’t, although a Galilean rabbi had been arrested for making trouble at the Temple, or so his sons told him. He spat upon hearing the news. Nothing good comes out of Galilee, he said. Some criminals were to be crucified, and it was rumored that the rabbi might be crucified, too, although no one was sure. Residents in the lower city heard only bits and pieces of what was going on at the Antonia, the Roman fortress built immediately next to the Temple. He was relieved that he’d finished his work for the Arimathean. The dump was especially foul after a crucifixion. It took days for victims to die and then putrefy as carrion birds picked their bones clean.
Not long before Sabbath sundown, a messenger came from the Arimathean. The new tomb had to be opened. Reluctantly, the tomb cutter set out through the city, which was quiet though still crowded with pilgrims. Fortunately, his sons had been close at hand, so they joined him, which would make the work go faster. They made for the Fish Gate and then for the new tomb.
The large closing-stone fit snugly and had been rolled into place over a lip of stone he had cut intentionally so it would fall into the round, low entrance of the tomb. He had left a slot at the top of the stone and had fashioned a special tool that, when slipped into the slot and down the back of the stone would engage a notch that enabled one man to pull the stone away from the entrance; without the tool, however, it was impossible to get hand or lever behind the stone to pull it out. He and his sons made short work of removing the stone. A few moments later, the Arimathean came with a small group of men carrying a corpse, followed by a few women.
This is one of the criminals, he thought, stepping back. The Arimathean said nothing but stood aside as the men carried the corpse into the tomb, which was no easy matter. The entrance was no more than three cubits across. The Arimathean passed a taper inside; a few moments later, the men came out. The women, carrying blocks of spices and a long piece of linen, went in for a few minutes then emerged. Everyone looked more frightened than grief-stricken. The sun was just above the horizon. Shadows were long. The tomb cutter aligned the closing stone then let it roll into the entrance of the tomb.
The Arimathean asked that the stone be removed early on the first day of the week. The tomb cutter agreed, then he and his sons hurried home. He wondered why the wealthy Arimathean let a criminal be put in his new family tomb; otherwise, he didn’t think much about it. It was the Sabbath, a day of rest. There had been no Passover riots. His family was safe and secure. Perhaps the day after tomorrow would shed more light on this strange burial.
__________
Chill air and darkness greeted the tomb cutter as he rose the morning of Yom Ree-Shom, the day after Sabbath. Snoring and deep breathing rose from his wife, sons and daughters, their spouses and children. He walked carefully through the house then picked up his tomb-opening tools—a large iron hook threaded with long leather straps and a stout wooden staff he’d put near the door. He splashed cold water on his face from a cistern then donned and cinched his stonecutter’s leather tunic, a protective outer shell worn over his garments.
Jerusalem’s streets lay empty. He decided not to carry a lamp but made his way in the dark through the city’s narrow but familiar streets. He passed through the Fish Gate no more than a half hour after leaving his house in the lower city. He picked his way carefully along a rocky path through an orchard then down a steep bank to the tomb he had made for the Arimathean. Golgotha’s stench rode the morning breeze. He marveled at the silence—no moans from the crosses, no screams. They must have died sooner than usual, he thought, which made the burial of the crucified man two days ago all the more strange.
He worked quickly to remove the globe-shaped stone from the mouth of the tomb. He dropped the carefully-fashioned iron hook behind the stone through a notch he’d made at the top of the stone, then skillfully let the hook slide down the back of the stone until it caught on a deep notch he’d made to fit the hook. He tied the strap ends together to form a loop, then used the staff put through the loop to pull the heavy stone from where it lay secure against the tomb entrance. It came to rest with some precision a few feet away from tomb’s mouth. The tomb cutter would align the stone carefully before replacing it after the body inside had been treated. He walked some distance away to wait for the women who would come to clean the body and drape it with linen. He would keep his distance and replace the stone when they left. He had no desire to see that corpse again. He found an olive tree, sat to lean against it and promptly dozed.
He was awakened by women’s voices as dawn light began to make its way over the Mount of Olives. The tomb cutter smiled as they marveled that the stone had been removed from the mouth of the tomb. He hoped they would be quick about their grisly business so he could replace the stone and return home. The first woman crouched to enter the tomb but quickly emerged, shouting at the others and tearing at her hair. She screamed, They’ve stolen his body! The other women looked into the tomb. All began keening their grief and fear. Surely this was the work of the Temple guard. The final degradation—a second death!
The tomb cutter slowly approached the grieving women, but before he could reach them, they rose and hurried back the way they’d come, almost running along a path to the Sheep Gate road that would take them across the Kidron Valley to the Mount of Olives and then Bethany two miles away. He turned back to the tomb and stooped to enter. Sunlight scarcely shone into the cave, but there was enough light to see that the corpse put on the ledge last Sabbath sundown was not there. The spice blocks and linen remained. Pungent spices only amplified the sickening odor of dried blood and human waste on the ledge. The tomb cutter left the tomb quickly but not quick enough to avoid vomiting.
No one could have stolen that man’s body, he thought; no one could have rolled away that stone. The Arimathean would be furious that someone had stolen the body. He had paid a premium for the tomb cutter’s reputed guarantee that tombs he made could not be robbed. He’d have to return his pay for this tomb. That setback, though, was nothing compared with damage to his reputation. Then came an even more frightening thought: He would be accused of stealing the body, because he was the only one who could open the tomb. He began to sweat as fear churned his innards. Morning had broken, and it would not be long before nearby roads would be swarming with traveling Passover pilgrims leaving the city. Rumors would spread quickly once the women told others what they had found. All eyes would be looking for the tomb cutter.
He staggered then collapsed in despair.
Don’t be afraid, said someone nearby. The tomb cutter leaped to his feet but saw no one. I’m here, said the man, behind the olive tree. Please don’t look upon my nakedness. The tomb cutter ignored the man’s plea and began walking toward the tree where he had sat waiting for the women. He took off his leather tunic, and without saying a word held it out for the man to take. The naked man slipped into the tunic then stepped from behind the tree.
Dried blood caked and matted his hair. Bruises covered his swollen face and blackened eyes. Torn flesh hung from his knees, which still oozed as he stood. Worst of all, the man’s hands and feet had been pierced and still bled. The stunned tomb cutter could but gawk at the man who wore his tunic.
I was one of them, the man said through labored breath as he sat down on a large stone. I was crucified two days ago, but then I awoke in the tomb. I was frightened, he said. I didn’t know where I was. It was so dark, I thought I was in Sheol. I couldn’t get out of the tomb. I prayed I would die. Then I heard the sound of metal against the stone, and the tomb was opened. I saw no one at first when I finally crawled out. I looked for a hiding place because I was naked.
The tomb cutter found his voice: Who are you?
Yeshua, the man said. I am a teacher from Galilee.
The tomb cutter backed away. He had seen a dead man laid in the tomb, a man flogged and crucified; and now, that man was speaking to him. His body hadn’t been stolen—or had it? What was he seeing now? A ghost? A demon? Something from Sheol come to haunt him? Moments before, the tomb cutter had feared for his reputation; now, he feared for his life. Perhaps this shade had come to kill him and take him to Sheol. The strangeness made his head swim as he backed away, reached for his tools and then turned to flee the way he’d come.
As he stumbled along a path through the olive trees, he heard voices behind him. Turning, he saw men and women coming to the tomb, but he didn’t see the Galilean. His family, thought the stone-cutter. They will accuse me. He plunged on through the trees to the Fish Gate road.
__________
The Arimathean never came to accuse him. It was well known who had made the tomb, and rumors of a crucified man risen from the dead percolated through the city. The tomb cutter kept silent. He knew nothing of the man, he would say when asked. He had opened the Arimathean’s tomb and then went home. Ask a Galilean, he would say as he spat with disgust.
Temple guards once came to ask about the Arimathean’s tomb. Yes, he said, I opened it. There was no body in it. No, I didn’t steal the body. It was unclean, and I am a religious man. How then, they asked, did the dead Galilean get out of the tomb? I don’t know, said the tomb cutter; maybe his disciples stole his body, though I don’t know how. That tomb could not be opened without my tools. Then you must have stolen the body, they said. No, he said, it was unclean. And so it went, round and round. The guards threatened to torture him but didn’t. The tomb cutter was known to be an honest man from a good family, generations of stonecutters who had helped build the Temple. The tomb cutter told no one, ever, that he had seen the man and fled. In any case, it wasn’t long before the story of the crucified teacher from Galilee who vanished from the Arimathean’s tomb was all but forgotten.
Almost, but not quite.
​
Follow Mays Publishing
Rosemary McAuley lives in Glasgow, Scotland. She has an MA(hons) in History of Art, MTh and a PhD in Theology and Religious Studies (all at University of Glasgow). She is also a painter and publishes articles on art and spirituality, as well as short stories and poems. Her website is rosemarytmcauley.com
​
The Beginning Light of Chanukah
Deep in the pit of a darkened world
Silenced in hushed agony’s prison
Where the black crows
Walk upon our dead
There rises sparks of blue and white
Dancing around our pain
In sweet anticipation of Melech haOlam
The conquering flame of light
Ignited this Chanukah night
His light growing day by day
Strengthening our victors cry
“Baruch atah Adonai
ELOHEIM”!!
See our universal King
Awakens to rouse up
His Majesty’s temple again
And put His golden feet upon
Tomorrow’s freedom.
​
Follow Mays Publishing
About Roy Gomez
Roy Gomez is currently working on a BA in English at Texas A&M-Corpus Christi. He lives with his wife, two kids, and far too many cats.
​
A Change Is Coming
Alan’s suicide note was delivered Priority Express in a sky-blue Hallmark envelope. What a brazenly final move! He must have dropped it in the mailbox with no reservations about his intentions. There was no return address, but I recognized his graffiti style handwriting. I struggled to find the courage to open it. Several months had elapsed, and yet, the regret and desire for absolution had not dissipated since our final interaction.
Our relationship was one sided. The only way he could get me to spend time with him was to show up at the low-traffic record store I work at. He committed my schedule to memory. As a result, I spent my days pleading with the seconds; hoping he wouldn’t show up and hold me hostage until the end of my shift. He was ten years my junior, seven inches shorter than me, and always yapping away like a chihuahua when in familiar company. He was the little brother of a friend of mine, and somewhere along the way he got the impression that we were close friends. He even gave me a switchblade adorned with an image of the Virgin Mary against the backdrop of the Mexican flag. READ THE REST IN CORPUS CHRISTI WRITERS 2023
​
Follow Mays Publishing