Posts Tagged ‘Boxes’

21 items.

Theories Regarding the Box

by Jenna on January 7th, 2004

Merit City

Merit City keeps its pain in a box. The box is by the tracks. There’s a hole in the box. There’s a stick by the hole. You can poke the stick through the hole. Then the box says, “Ouch!” It’s not very surprising. That’s just the kind of vocalization you’d expect from a box of pain! Plus, it’s getting poked with a stick.

“I find the world astringent,” says a blonde woman. She has very straight hair.

“People never seem to be as moral as I’d like,” adds a short man. He has an estimable degree.

They say it together. “Let’s poke the box with a stick!”

That’s what the box is for.

The First Theory

The box has a terrorist in it. That’s why Merit City encourages you to poke the stick through the hole. It’s preventative medicine! Terrorists never visit Merit City. They’re too scared! What if they got put in the box too? They just unleash terror weapons from neighbouring jurisdictions.

Children are too sympathetic to the terrorist. They always want to feed him. “Don’t feed the terrorist!” That’s what their parents have to say.

“Why?”

“Because.”

“Why?”

“Because!”

“WHY?”

The question’s too good! The parents have to explain. “Food is what makes terrorists strong,” they say. “It contains microscopic calories that people burn for energy. Most people burn their calories to do good works and advance the cause of civilization. But a terrorist converts the special energy of calories to evil.”

Stacy feeds the terrorist anyway. She’s too sympathetic! Sentiment causes all sorts of trouble. The box makes crunching noises. Is the terrorist consuming calories and converting them to energy? Yes! Sparks fly in every direction. Zap! Zap! Zap!

“Stacy!” her mother exclaims, aghast. “You’re grounded!”

The box always smells winter-fresh. That’s how you know it’s got a terrorist in it. Terrorists smell winter-fresh!

The Second Theory

Sid is just walking along, chilling. He’s wearing a sweater, jeans, and flip-floppy shoes. He’s pretty cute, as Sid goes. Suddenly, men in black suits surround him. “Ack!” says Sid. “Now I’m underdressed!” They grab Sid and hustle him to the train tracks. Then they put him in a box!

“Well, that helps,” says Sid, somewhat mollified. He’s still not as nicely dressed as the men in black, but now no one can see.

“Ahem,” announces one of Sid’s captors. Everyone near the train turns to look. “This is a box of pain. It’s a special service — a Merit City exclusive! If you’re hurting, you should come down by the tracks. You can blame the box for your pain!”

He demonstrates. He reaches down to the ground. He picks up a stick. He pokes it through the hole in the box. He pokes Sid. “Ouch!” says Sid.

The man in black takes a deep breath and then relaxes. “I feel much better,” he says. “Everyone should try it!”

People cluster around. They blame the box for their troubles. They pick up the stick. They poke Sid through the hole. “Ouch!” says Sid.

Later, Sid says, “Er, could someone let me out of the box?” But he never says that when anyone’s around to hear. Only when he’s alone! That’s his mistake.

Sometimes, it snows, down by the train. Sid must be cold, but he never complains. Maybe the box is heated. Maybe he’s just naturally frosty. It’s difficult to say one way or the other. That’s the point of the box!

The Third Theory

Inside the box is a robot. It’s not just any robot! It’s a robotic pain. That’s the worst kind of robot. It’s an electronic nuisance!

The robot comes from the factory. The people who work at the factory wear black suits. That’s their dress code. It reduces reflections. It reduces glare! That’s what makes them so good at robotics.

“Smith,” says the boss. “Jenkins. I want you to take this robot and put it in a box. Then leave it by the tracks! It’s a Merit City exclusive. People can blame it for their pain!”

“That’s a good idea,” says Jenkins. “Otherwise, we’d have to use it for a doorstop!”

“0101101,” says the robot, mournfully.

“That’s what you think,” says Smith, and puts the robot in a box. Then he takes it down to the tracks. “Ahem,” he says. He tells people about the robot! You’ve already heard his speech.

“This is cruel to the robot,” says PETR. They break into the box. They try to free the robot. The robot zaps them. “Ow!” cry the PETR agents. “Why must humans program robots to be so mean?”

“0101101,” says the robot, with poetic irony.

PETR goes away. They can’t save this robot! It’s important to have realistic goals. “We’ll gatecrash Robot Wars and end its senseless violence!”

The winter air is crisp and clean. It’s a beautiful world.

A Mom walks by. She has a young girl and an AIBO. The AIBO sniffs the box and whines. The young girl looks at the box.

“I’ll show you, dear,” says the Mom. She picks up the stick. She pokes it through the hole. “Ouch!” says the robot.

The girl giggles. She picks up the stick. She pokes it through the hole. “Ouch!” says the robot.

Then the girl drops the stick and hugs the box. “I love you!”

“Sheila,” lectures the Mom, “don’t hug the box of pain.”

“Mommy,” says Sheila, “I want to give the box of pain my Barbie, because it’s so cool!”

The robot goes whirr-click. Then it shoots sparks at Sheila! It objects to the unrealistic portrayal of women that Barbie dolls embody.

“Hey!” Sheila says. She shoots sparks back. That’s unexpected! It must be her mutant power. Hopefully the robot’s learned its lesson about shocking five year old girls — sometimes, they bite back!

The Fourth Theory

The box is just what it says it is. It’s a box full of pain.

Never open the box! It’s very important that you don’t. If you do, the pain will get out. It’ll get into everything! Soon everyone will be hurting. Merit City won’t have public pain any more. It’ll have private pain! Ninja Buddhas will shake their fingers at you—that’s how naughty it would be!

It’s pretty obvious what you’re thinking. “You can’t lock pain up in a box!” But that just shows how much you know. The pain people feel—that’s just an echo. That’s just a memory. People haven’t known real suffering since 1963, when the first mage-smith of Merit made the first box of pain.

She was trying to make strawberry shortcake. She got the ingredients wrong.

People laugh at her when she tells that story, but shortcake is complicated! It really is! Anyone could have made that mistake!

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Still Life

by Jenna on January 14th, 2004

On the mountain, there lived a young man. He had a creature that he kept in a box. It had a lot of eyes and mouths. He loved that creature.

The creature was all that kept him going. His job wasn’t happy. He didn’t have a girlfriend. His art never went anywhere. His life was small and sad. But he had his creature. His thing. He could come home and sit by the box and push food through the bars. It would eat the food. It made his heart glad. So the man didn’t have much, but he had something.

One day, he read:

If you love something,
let it go.

“I understand,” he said. So he took the creature down to the city. He opened the box. The creature crawled out.

“If you come back to me,” he said. “It was truly meant to be.”

The creature snarled. It crawled into the city. It began killing people one by one. The city called out the army. Infantry shot the creature. Tanks bombarded it with shells. It killed the infantry. It crushed the tanks. It tore down the buildings. The city died. The creature crawled on.

“This isn’t like in the proverb,” the man said. Then he shrugged. He was sad. He went back to his mountain.

He checked the news now and then. The creature destroyed civilization, bit by bit. Its path went away, away. The creature killed people the man didn’t like. This made him feel a little better. But it also killed people he admired. That made him feel worse. He stopped checking the news.

One morning the last city fell. He could hear the rockets in the distance. He could hear the fireworks. People were celebrating. It was a momentous occasion. “That’s the way of people,” he said. “When the sadness is too much, you have to start celebrating instead. I suppose, without urban centers, it’ll have to hunt people down one by one.”

It didn’t matter. He went inside. He sat by the box. He pushed some food through the bars. “Come on,” he said. “Eat.”

Nothing happened. The creature was long gone. He laughed at himself, and he took the food back. But he did it the next day, and the next. Then he cried himself to sleep.

In the morning, he woke to the sound of sirens. The creature was coming to the mountain.

He went outside. He didn’t bring his gun. There wasn’t any point. He stood out in the open, where it would see him easily; where it would kill him easily.

The creature approached. He spread his arms. He closed his eyes. He could hear it shuffle closer. He could hear it shuffle past. He heard it shuffle into his house.

He turned. His heart was very still. He went inside. He went to the box. He pushed food through the bars. It ate the food.

This made his heart glad.

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Boxes

by Jenna on January 14th, 2004

You shouldn’t keep people in boxes! That’s the rule.

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The Tunnels (I/IV)

by Jenna on January 19th, 2004

In January, 1974, the Pandora Squad began putting things of great value in the tunnels. Gold. Jewels. Subway trains. Ruby-studded jet zeppelins. Rare and collectible giant spiders. Promises, hopes, dreams, and silver. No one ever found out why, because the Pandora Squad promptly exceeded its budget and went defunct.

Three months passed.

Jenna has an immortal soul and a mortal nature. She demonstrates them while talking to the hero. He makes a point. Jenna dies. There’s an awkward silence.

“Clearly,” says the hero, “you’re a mortal creature, bound by time.”

Jenna slumps on the floor.

“I shouldn’t make my points so forcefully,” the hero says. It’s gallows humor. On a dead audience, it falls flat. Jenna doesn’t giggle. She just grows colder.

“. . . I should probably cremate you.”

Jenna is mortal. But she also has an immortal soul. She demonstrates that too! She reanimates her body and hops to her feet. “You don’t have to cremate me. I can be a zombie!”

He’s the hero. He’s suave. He can handle this. But it disturbs him. “Zombies rot and their body parts fall off. Maybe you could be a vampire? Then you’d be my arch-nemesis.”

“I could be an anentropic zombie,” Jenna proposes. “Instead of rotting, I’d grow ever more beautiful! And I could be a mime!”

“I don’t want you to be a mime.”

Jenna pretends to be an anentropic zombie trapped in an invisible box. “Look! I’m inside an invisible box! It’s a sealed system, so the order constantly increases. That’s my noncompliance with the principle of entropy at work!”

“I appreciate the explanation,” the hero says, “as I would not readily have derived that from your visual cues. Mimes don’t usually narrate, though.”

Jenna ignores him and pretends to be an anentropic zombie struggling against the wind. “Oh no! Bits of fashionable clothing are blowing onto me from all over and replacing my dreary cerements! But my umbrella—it’s inverted!”

The hero sighs, leans back, and closes his eyes. Once he has his equilibrium, he says, “I love you.” It’s true, but it’s also the only way to stop the narrated miming.

“You shouldn’t cremate people you love. I mean, not when they’re still moving around.”

“That’s true. I try to live my life by this rule.”

“We all should!” Jenna declares. “We could achieve a perfect world.”

“But an anentropic zombie can’t live in our house,” the hero points out. “People would talk.”

Jenna snorts. “People.”

“And I’m not sure I’m ready for it.” The hero thinks. “You could live in the tunnels.”

“Is an anentropic zombie very valuable?”

“Rarity would seem to suggest it.”

Jenna shakes her head. Her hair grows shorter but ever more beautiful. “Nope. Scarcity is an entropic measure of value. For anentropic objects, commonality would have to determine value—the arrow of time points the other way!”

The hero sighs. “You could be a ghost,” he offers. “Ghosts are rare but subject to entropy.”

“I want to exist,” Jenna says. “I want to be me. When I heard that I was dead, that was all I could think. I’m not done being me. I like myself. I’m cool. So I dragged myself back from the grave.”

The hero smiles. “Narcissist.”

“Narcissism is important,” Jenna says, firmly. “The first thing the universe said to me after I was born was, ‘love yourself.’”

“Oh?”

“Yup. ‘Love yourself. Trust yourself. Be true to yourself. Oh, and, by the way, you can no longer absorb nutrients through your belly button.’”

The hero smiles. “I’m glad you came back.”

“I can’t live with you?”

“You’re dead.”

Jenna closes her eyes for a moment, and then opens them. “Depreciation is a function of entropy,” she says. “So I’m a good investment, at least.”

“I’m sure that’ll do.”

“Yay!” Jenna says. “I get to live in tunnels!”

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Aegisthus (IV/IV)

by Jenna on March 25th, 2004

Tell me, oh muse, of the decision of Aegisthus, who learned the truth of his heritage: son and grandson both of the monster Thyestes, who sired him by force on Pelopia’s womb. Tell me of Aegisthus, who stood with sword in hand in the cold wet cell where Thyestes sat enchained, and chose, not to kill, but to strike free the monster’s chains. I must turn to you, oh muse, for this decision is not one I can encompass; but still he made it; and so have countless others through the years; down the line from one to another, to the monster Jenna and Liril knew.

**

It is 1212 years before the common era. The sun in the clouds is the color of a flame. A young boy named Aegisthus stands upon a hill. He holds a sword. He cuts his hand with it and smears its edge with blood. Then he thrusts it into the ground. The world cracks open. He calls out, “Tiresias! Tiresias! Prophet and oracle!” A ghost suspires from the ground and sips the blood from the edge of the sword.

“Oracle,” Aegisthus says. “I am Aegisthus, son of Atreus, and one day I shall be King. Yet I wish to be more. My ambition does not end with such paltry measures. I must command the gods themselves. Speak me an oracle. Give me an answer to my dream.”

Tiresias turns blind, dead eyes on Aegisthus. “Many in the world have desires. Why should yours take precedence?”

Aegisthus shrugs.

Tiresias sighs. “What you ask is impossible. If you must attempt it, then go to the spring of the nymph Cyane and wake her with your blood.”

The earth takes breath, and pulls Tiresias away. Aegisthus withdraws his sword and the world grinds closed.

The next morning, four people leave Mycenae. Aegisthus goes to Sicily, where the spring of Cyane is found. His half-brothers Agamemnon and Menelaus travel to the Oracle, searching for the King’s hated brother Thyestes. These three leave with fanfare and with wealth, for Atreus King loves them well; but Atreus’ youngest wife, Pelopia, hearing certain rumors regarding Leda’s daughter Helen, walks away in silence, and few mark her departure.

Aegisthus takes a boat, and then a road, and finds himself in Sicily next to an ancient spring. He stirs the water with his finger. It forms an image. Aegisthus sees the chariot of Hades, charging across the world, with captive Persephone in Hades’ arms. Then the nymph Cyane rises from the stream. She spreads her arms to bar Hades’ way.

“‘No,’” Aegisthus says, watching the image of her mouth. “‘No,’ she says, and ‘Go no further! This maiden must be asked, not taken.’”

Then Hades smites the spring, and the world cracks open, and his chariot gallops down into the Underworld, and the waters of the spring seal over. Cyane weeps, and as she cries, she loses substance, until the spring and nymph alike are nothing but her tears.

The water goes still. The vision ends. Aegithus frowns. He cuts his hand. He smears his sword with blood. He dips it through the water to touch the stone Hades’ sceptre broke.

“Ew.” Cyane rises from the pool. “Ew. Don’t do that. Ick. Ew.”

“What?”

Aegisthus, uncertainly, withdraws his sword.

“Memories. Symbolism. Mind in the gutter.” Cyane looks at him. She shudders. “What do you want?”

“Can you do impossible things?”

“I’ve tried. I failed. I wish I could.”

“I am Aegisthus,” he says, “son of Atreus. I wish to sit at Olympus on the high god’s throne; or, if I cannot, that my heirs should do so. I spoke of this to the dead prophet Tiresias, and he sent me to you.”

She sits on a rock and thinks.

“So I’d rather like you to tell me what to do,” he says. “Or give me some kind of magic to achieve my ends.”

She thinks more.

“Please?”

Cyane looks at him. Her expression is calm. “Go home,” she says. “Call for me again when everything you know is true proves false.”

“It’s a long walk,” he says.

“You’ve got sandals,” she answers. So he leaves.

Cyane sits upon a stone. She thinks. Then she turns to the water, and an image of Persephone forms. Persephone looks up.

“Cyane!” she says. Her voice is glad and bright. Cyane smiles crookedly.

“I’d thought you might be angry,” Cyane says.

“Why?”

“I failed.”

Persephone thinks about that for a moment. Then she reaches up a finger to touch the surface of the water; and Cyane sets her hand upon it; and for a time, the two of them are still.

“I have anger, hate, and rage enough,” Persephone says, “to fill the world, and slosh against each person in it. But none for you.”

“Can I free you?”

“No,” Persephone says. “It’s impossible, even for a nymph.”

“But you’d like me to.”

Persephone sighs. “There’s that in all of us that wants the impossible. The real can hurt so much.”

“I’ll free you,” Cyane says. She closes her eyes. “I promise.”

Persephone’s eyes narrow. “Cyane—”

The sun passes above the spring, and the glare of the sun on the water turns blinding, and Persephone can see the nymph no more.

In Laconia, near Mount Taygetus, Atreus’ wife Pelopia looks up at the sun. “So bright,” she says.

She trudges down the road. Her feet are bloody. It’s a long way from Mycenae, and she’s lost her sandals along the way. She comes to a clearing.

Helen sits against a tree. Her hair runs down the bark. She’s not yet the most beautiful woman in the world. She’s very young.

Helen opens her eyes.

“I wondered if you’d come,” Helen says.

Pelopia hesitates. “I want things to be different,” she says.

“Why?”

“Not all of us can be the children of gods and swans,” Pelopia says. “My father was Thyestes, now an exile. I went into Athena’s service, and on the night of a ceremony, a masked stranger caught and forced me and got a child on me. I took his sword as he lay sated, but found myself unable to kill—not him and not myself. So I fled. My uncle Atreus, who would kill me if he knew my parentage, thought me the daughter of another King, and took me to wife. When I bore the stranger’s child, he imagined it as his own. I had hoped to make some small brightness from this, but my son Aegisthus is as empty as the sky. His eyes are hollow. He cuts his own flesh with the sword I stole and gave to him. There is nothing I may do to save him. This is the world I live in. I want it to be different.”

Helen bites her lip. Then she reaches out a hand. She touches Pelopia’s elbow. “You’re like the sea,” she says.

“I went to the sea once,” Pelopia says. “I washed the blood off. And the dirt. And the tears. And all the foulness of mankind. And the sea stayed clean. But I’m not like that.”

Helen makes a sad face. “Okay.”

“Okay?”

“When your father dies, go and stand before his grave and call to me. I’ll make you an immortal.”

At the Oracle of Delphi, Agamemnon and Menelaus, sons of Atreus, meet their uncle Thyestes. They catch him and bind him and return home; and on one weary evening, Agamemnon, Meneleaus, Aegisthus, and Pelopia reach their home together. Atreus consults the entrails of a goat. He turns to Aegisthus and Pelopia. He says, “As Thyestes was Agamemnon’s and Menelaus’ to capture, he is yours to kill.”

“Ours?” Pelopia asks.

“Yours.”

“Come, mother,” Aegisthus says, and leads her down into the dark. There, he opens the door of Thyestes’ cell, and goes in. Thyestes slouches languidly against the wall, bound in irons. There’s a touch of fear in his face as Aegisthus enters; but it fades as he sees Pelopia, and dissolves entirely when Aegisthus draws his sword.

“I know that sword,” Thyestes says. He smiles lazily. “But how did you come by it?”

Aegisthus hesitates. Thyestes’ expression and his choice of topics confuses the boy. The execution has turned unexpectedly uncomfortable. “My mother,” he says. “She gave it to me.”

“Then,” says Thyestes, “this is the sword my daughter took from me, after I lay with her to conceive you; and you are my son, my grandson, and my destined instrument of vengeance, raised in my enemy’s house as his very own son. You will kill him for me,” continues Thyestes. “You will kill him for me, and set me on the throne, for this is the revenge promised me by the Oracle, and now I see you shall fulfill it.”

There is a silence. Pelopia’s face grows paler. Aegisthus’ eyes are blank and white.

“I should kill you,” Aegisthus says. “I should kill you thrice over. For Atreus, and Pelopia, and myself.”

“You’re my son,” Thyestes says.

The corner of Aegisthus’ mouth twitches. The sword wavers in his hands. Then he turns, and strikes the wall. The blade splits the stone, and water pours into the room like blood. Aegisthus beats his head upon the wall. “Cyane!” he cries. “Cyane!”

A woman rises from the water. She shivers at the cold air. She draws the water up from the ground. She wraps it around her. It’s like a long jacket. There are lumps under the back, like budding wings.

“You’re different,” he says.

“I made a promise that I couldn’t fulfill,” she says. “So I changed.”

“Into what?”

“Someone who could do anything,” she says. “Sometimes.” She smiles at him. “Thank you,” she adds. “I thought about it, when I watched Hades take her off, but I didn’t dare. Not until you came along, impertinently bringing me to life to fill your own emptiness and then asking the impossible.”

“Make it not true,” Aegisthus says. “Make him not my father.”

Cyane looks at Thyestes. She makes a helpful gesture. Then she smiles wryly at Aegisthus. “It didn’t work this time.”

“Oh.”

“Monster!” Pelopia shouts. She pulls the sword from the wall and lunges towards Thyestes, but Aegisthus grabs her arm, and pulls her back, and casts her against the wall, where she sits.

“Monster,” she says again, and stares at the sword. She runs it along the edges of her wrists.

Thyestes grins at her. Then he looks up at Aegisthus. “If she keeps bleeding on it like that, you can take it to Atreus and say it’s my blood. Then kill him with it later, by surprise! It’s like a family reunion, all that blood on one sword.”

“Why would I do that?” Aegisthus asks.

Cyane tilts her head to one side. “Because he can tell you the secret of the gods,” she says.

“What?” Aegisthus’ voice is hoarse.

“You asked me to give you power to command the gods,” Cyane says. “I can’t. But he can.”

Aegisthus hesitates.

Cyane kneels by Pelopia. “I had to tell him,” she says, apologetically. “I belong to him. Kind of. Because I was dead, and then he put his blood in the spring, and called me forth. But I can try to save your life. If you want me to.”

Aegisthus claims the sword, and walks to Thyestes, and strikes down the chains.

“Monster,” Pelopia mutters.

Aegisthus leaves the room, and Thyestes too, and they close and lock the door behind them.

“He tried to change,” Cyane says, clinically. “Thyestes tried a hundred plans. He tried a hundred ways not to do what he did to you. But all of them were too hard, so he gave up.”

“Save my life,” Pelopia says.

Cyane wraps her jacket around Pelopia’s wounds; and slowly, the bleeding stops.

“I’m going to stand at his grave one day,” Pelopia says. “And I’m going to call to Helen, and become a god.”

“What kind of god?”

“I’ll be like a nymph,” Pelopia says. “They’ll come. People will come, and try to catch me. Because if they catch me, their plans will succeed. If they can catch me, they can change their fate, and break the cycle of the world.”

“And will they catch you?”

“No,” Pelopia says. “I won’t let them. I can’t let them. Not again. I’ll be as evasive as the wind.”

Cyane leans back against the wall.

“That’s what drives them, you know,” Cyane says.

“What?”

“People like your son. They make gods. They have such emptiness in them, and can make such emptiness in others, that gods come to them in swarms. But they can’t ever be one. It’s what makes them monsters.”

“I’m not sorry for him,” Pelopia says.

“No,” Cyane admits. “Neither am I.”

“It’s his own decision,” Pelopia says. “As ours are ours. But I wish he hadn’t locked the door.”

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The Unsubstantiated Assertions Fairy (II/II)

by Jenna on June 16th, 2004

It is 1968.

“I’ve been dreaming of Tantalus.”

1968’s monster doesn’t look up. He’s like and unlike the monster of today: a spectacled man, with a striped suit and gray hair. He’s not paying attention to Priyanka, at least, not obviously. He’s playing, instead, with a spider in a box. It has its legs curled up tightly against its body. He tugs gently on one with his left hand. Slowly, the spider’s legs splay. He lets go. The legs quickly retract. “The Incans used to use this as divination,” he says. “Lock a spider in a box, and then look at what its legs are like when you open the box. I’m taking it one step further—by training the spider, I can control the future!”

Priyanka looks up. “Is it going well?” she asks.

“It isn’t biting me any more.”

“Progress is encouraging!”

Priyanka’s ankles are bound to the chair legs. Her wrists are tied to the wall. They have enough play that they can rest on her lap, but not enough to dangle at her sides. The chair is reasonably comfortable. The ropes are not, and her wrists and ankles are raw and red. She tests them occasionally, wincing, but it’s a formality. She has an interest in escape, but not the drive.

The monster looks up. “So,” he says. “Tantalus.”

“He is empty,” she says. “He stands in a land of plenty, but when he reaches for fruit, the wind whips the branches away. When he reaches for water, it drains into the parched earth.”

“Is that emptiness? I’d have called it despair.”

Priyanka considers this. “Despair is an action,” she says. “Emptiness is a state.”

“Ah.”

The monster puts down the box and the spider. He closes its lid. “Are you empty, Priyanka?”

“Sometimes I think so,” she says. “But still—I hang on to a little bit of myself. Because it’s important.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know,” she admits. “I have this theory, that it matters—to be who I am, to express who I’m supposed to be. But I don’t know why.”

The monster laughs. “No one’s important for themselves,” he says. “We’re important based on the roles we play in others’ lives.”

“Oh?”

“It’s arrogant,” he says, “to believe anything else.”

She giggles a little.

“What?” he asks.

“Snatch!” she says. “I stole your God!”

He looks vaguely perplexed.

“It’s something Mom taught me,” Priyanka says. “It’s a thing to say when people give too much importance to their own beliefs. If you don’t have God in your pocket, you can’t very well argue from authority. So.” She makes a snatching gesture, brought up short by the rope on her right wrist. It cuts into raw red skin, and she winces. “Snatch! I steal your God, and then you can’t make unsubstantiated assertions.”

“I laugh at God,” he says.

“True.”

“So it’s not very relevant.”

She bites her lip. She looks down. She thinks. “I think God is just a metaphor,” she says. “For whatever it is that makes people so sure that they know what’s right and what’s wrong.”

He smiles a little. “I have a fairy.”

“Pardon?”

“An unsubstantiated assertions fairy, or UAF. She lives in my pocket. When I ask her to, she declares something right.”

“Oh.”

“For example,” he says. He fishes out the fairy. It stands on the palm of his hand. Its name is Pomegranate. “Is it important that Priyanka be herself?” he asks.

“No,” Pomegranate says.

“See?” he says. “It’s not just my opinion. It’s also the fairy’s.”

“But what if the fairy is wrong?”

“The fairy is never wrong,” the monster says. “Are you, Pommy?”

“No!” Pomegranate states firmly.

“See, if you could steal my unsubstantiated assertion fairy,” 1968′s monster explains, “then you might have a case. As it is . . .”

“It’s the same thing!” Priyanka says. “The fairy is your God!”

“Nuh-uh,” Pomegranate informs her. “It’s magic. I wave my wand and make things righteous. It’s totally different.”

“Winning an argument takes power,” the monster says. “No matter what you’re arguing about, or what the logic might be.”

Priyanka sags. There’s a long silence.

After a while, the monster goes to the box, and opens it up again. The spider is busily eating a bee. There’s another long silence.

“. . . does that have a divinatory meaning?” Priyanka asks.

“Do you know,” says the monster, “I’m not sure?”

“If you eat a live bee, you’ll go to Heaven!” the UAF declares.

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Adjective Noun

by Jenna on March 28th, 2005

Jane is practicing her observation. She finds an (animal, such as you would find in a box) in a box.

“Schrödinger’s been at it again!” concludes Jane. “But I’ll check inside with my shrewd investigation and determine whether it’s alive or dead.”

She checks inside the box. The (animal) is alive.

“Yay!” says Jane.

“(Noise)!” says the (animal).

“(Noise)!” agrees Jane.

“That’s annoyingly nonspecific,” says Martin. He’s leaning against a (thing, such as one might lean against). He adjusts his (attitude) goggles.

Jane looks puzzled. “That’s not Schrödinger’s work,” she admits.

She surveys the (animal).

“Maybe there’s an (adjective noun),” Jane theorizes.

She hefts the (animal). She turns it over. There’s an (adjective noun) clinging to its underbelly.

“Aha!” says Jane.

She points at the (adjective noun) on its fur. It pulses (adjectively). “See?”

“Hm?” Martin temporizes.

“I did a paper on this for (grade),” Jane says. “It turns out that the nonspecificity in the world isn’t natural. It’s a biotechnological innovation fueled by the life energy of the (adjective noun)s!”

Martin blinks. “So, when (politician you don’t like) dodges questions on (issue), they’re using (adjective noun)s?”

“(Response),” Jane enthuses.

Martin frowns.

“They’re not just political,” Jane notes. “They’re also used in Mad Libs. I bet that the (disaster) down at the Mad Libs (containment facility) let some of them escape. Now it’s clinging to (animal) as an expression of its platonic love for nature!”

“(embarrassed observation),” says (adjective noun).

“(The kind of thing you would expect Martin to say in this circumstance),” Martin says.

“It might also love boxes,” Jane suggests.

“(The kind of thing you would expect Martin to say in this circumstance),” Martin, arguably, repeats.

“It’s a bit like (profound truth) in a (pop culture reference),” Jane agrees.

The (adjective noun) (adverb verbs).

Jane laughs.

It’s funny, because (explanation of the joke).

And Jane laughs with the (adjective noun), and she hugs it close to her, and in a world freed so many years ago from (that thing which causes or resembles suffering or sorrow). And there is a pang in her for a moment then that may be traced, ultimately, to a story that didn’t end; to a (thing) that continued past the devouring of the world; to a difficulty worked into the fabric of things that did not end when (the condition or conditions of life that mandate suffering) went away:

“Because we couldn’t live without them,” (name) observes.

(Hitherby Dragons)

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(Tired Bonus) A Thousand Mice

by Jenna on April 8th, 2005

Helen is a teenaged girl living in Brooklyn.

On the evening of April 3rd, 1997, Helen comes home from a shopping trip. She’s hiding her face behind a box and carrying a mouse cage in her free hand. She lugs it into her room. It’s a typical teen girl’s room, except that its walls are padded and it has no mirrors. It has two windows. One window is open. It has no screen, but there’s a piece of paper taped over the opening. It’s a big note, written on construction paper. It says, “No Launching! – Tyndareus”

Helen puts down the cage.

She looks at the note.

LAUNCH!

The note flies through the air. It flutters, flutters, flutters down to the Earth below.

Helen does not look at the cage. She opens it.

A mouse runs out. It runs around. It squeaks. Suddenly, it sees Helen’s face.

LAUNCH!

Another mouse runs around. It squeaks. Suddenly, it sees Helen’s face.

LAUNCH!

The last mouse walks out. It is quiet and dignified. It is a solid gentleman of a mouse. It looks up. It opens its mouth to squeak.

LAUNCH!

Flutter, flutter, flutter, down to the Earth below.

“Helen?”

It’s her adoptive father’s voice! Helen quickly hides her face behind the box so she doesn’t launch him. Then she turns. “Yes, father?”

Tyndareus’ voice is wry and gentle. “The neighbors say it’s raining mice again.”

“I’m trying to get to a thousand,” Helen says.

She’s hiding her face behind a box labelled “e-Life.” It’s a promotional box for a revolutionary Internet-aware life management application! Treading the thin line between an Outlook clone and a massively multiplayer online RPG, e-Life proved impossible for its original designers to launch. Helen hasn’t launched it yet, but she doesn’t quite trust it—the box always seems as light and trembly as feathers in her hands.

“If I launch a thousand mice,” Helen says, “then I won’t launch mice any more, and I can keep one as a pet. But if I don’t launch them on purpose, then I’ll launch them every time I happen across one, and I’ll be old and gray before I can buy one to keep!”

“I suppose that’s true,” Tyndareus says. “But couldn’t you aim them away from the street?”

“Father!” Helen says. “If they don’t fly out the window, they’ll hit the wall!”

She’s so shocked by his suggestion that she lowers the box.

LAUNCH!

Tyndareus flies through the air. He hits the wall. It’s padded, of course. He lands with a long-suffering slump.

“Five hundred and seventy-nine,” he says.

“Oops,” Helen blushes.

“You know,” he says, “if I can survive it, the mice probably can. And it’s less of a fall.”

Helen blushes deeper.

“I didn’t think of that,” she admits.

She hangs her head.

“It’s okay,” he says. Then he laughs. “Hey,” he says, “you’ll be through launching me before you’re old and gray.”

“That’s true,” she agrees.

“Before I’m old and gray, even,” he says.

“You’re pretty old already, Daddy,” she says.

He grins. “Maybe,” he says.

“Hey,” she says.

“Hey?”

“Hey,” she says, and she’s suddenly looking pretty sad, “Hey, I was wondering, is it because I’m ugly?”

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Aloe Vera, in “Secrets”

by Jenna on May 10th, 2005

Sid is a boy. He is playing.

Suddenly Aloe Vera arrives.

“Hello, Sid!” says Aloe Vera.

Aloe Vera is a magical spirit. She is two feet tall. She wears an aloe hat.

“Hello,” says Sid.

Sid is dubious at first. Then they become the best of friends.

Aloe Vera is everyone’s best friend.

“I love you, Aloe Vera!” says Sid.

They hug.

Later, Sid grows up. Sid becomes a terrorist. Sid plots to destabilize the U.S. government.

“Are you a terrorist?” Agent Simmons asks Sid.

“No, sir!” says Sid.

It’s a clever lie to escape punishment! But it does not fool Agent Simmons.

“Lock him away,” Agent Simmons says.

Agent Simmons’ associates put Sid in a box. Then they dial the Aloe Vera hotline and hand Agent Simmons the phone.

“Hello, Aloe Vera!” says Agent Simmons. “We have a terrorism suspect—but he won’t confess!”

“I’ll help out!” says Aloe Vera.

Aloe Vera runs across grassy fields. Aloe Vera runs across busy streets. Aloe Vera runs across deserted shopping malls. Her dog Lanolin barks and bounds at her heels.

Sid’s door opens. Sid looks up. He is haggard. He is hungry.

“Aloe Vera?” Sid says.

“Hello, Sid!” says Aloe Vera. “Friends tell friends about plots to destabilize the U.S. government, right?”

Sid hangs his head.

“That’s true,” he admits.

Aloe Vera taps her foot.

“Well?”

“I guess my contacts and I were going to smuggle biological weapons into Merit City under the business name Fat Beagle Industries,” says Sid. “Then we’d grandstand for the media. We were going to call our actions ‘the moral alternative’ and lobby for reduced corn overproduction!”

“I see,” says Aloe Vera.

Aloe Vera nods.

“Thank you for telling me, Sid. You’re a good friend.”

“You’re a good friend, too, Aloe Vera. That secret was eating me up inside.”

Aloe Vera hugs Sid.

“I’ll tell the extra-judicial examiner you have a good heart,” Aloe Vera says.

When you have a secret
And it hurts to keep
You can tell your friends
And get some stress relief!
– A Special Aloe Vera Message to You

Later, Aloe Vera forgets all about Sid.

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Ink in Perspective

by Jenna on May 26th, 2005

“The world of competitive spelling is not Hell,” says Ink Catherly. Then she adds, “H-E-L-L. Hell. It’s not. That.”

“Ink,” warns Mama Carpenter, “You listen to what I’m telling you. If you’re going to be the kind of girl who doesn’t cooperate, who badmouths Mama Carpenter, who doesn’t study her spelling, or who won’t give me the data I need for her spelling bee forms—you’ll find out what Hell is like real quick.”

Ink glares at her. “I don’t care. This is just a stupid orphanage with stupid priorities and I’m going to leave your whole world behind as soon as I can.”

“Go to the quiet room,” Mama Carpenter says. “You go to the quiet room, and you think on what I’ve said, and when you come out, you’d better be ready to tell me what Ink is really short for.”

“Just because you can’t spell Pancreozyminchoriomammotropinate,” sulks Ink.

“Disrespectful child,” sulks Mama Carpenter back.

Ink stomps off.

Floor 93-DL: They throw their children into pools, here, when the children are bad.

There is never a shark in the pool when the child is thrown in.

But sometimes there is a shark, once they hit.

“Children with overactive imaginations bring their own doom down on their heads,” say the parents, philosophically. “You cannot hold us accountable for the actions of imaginary sharks.”

There is so much blood!

But I think that it is better, because if the children survived, then as adults they could dream up scarier things than sharks.

When they threw me in, the water was a shock, and above me, as I turned and struck for air, the waves broke the sky into ten thousand parts.

“Now we have no sky,” they mourned. “Plus, you are still alive and have not been eaten by a shark.”

“Perhaps it disgorged me, and I am now a revivified shark-powered horror,” I said.

This was not responsible of me.

In the quiet room Ink meets Emily.

Emily is a girl. She’s been stuffed in the orphanage just like Ink was. And Emily is on Jump.

“What’s it like?” Ink asks, after a while.

Emily blinks. Her eyes clear and focus. She looks at Ink. Then she laughs a bit, nervously. “What? Jump?”

“Yeah.”

Emily shrugs. “It’s a thing,” she says. “T-H-I-N-G. Thing.”

Emily paces in long circles around the room. Suddenly, Emily jumps. Her head strikes something that Ink can’t see. There’s a sound like a ringing bell. When Emily lands, she has a crisp five dollar bill in her hands.

“It’s Jump,” Emily says.

Ink watches Emily pace. “How does it work?”

Emily flushes suddenly. She sits down. She tries to hold herself still. “It’s not like you think,” she says. “I can stop. If I want to.”

Ink looks blank.

“It’s not important,” Emily stresses. “Not like spelling. That’s what Mama Carpenter says. It doesn’t mean anything when I jump.”

Emily’s fingers twitch. She looks down at the floor.

“It’s just a little bit of a pill,” Emily says. “Just a little bit. Only, it’s like . . . when I don’t Jump, when I haven’t, when I’ve just been spelling, it feels . . . stressy. S-T-R-E-S-S-Y. Stressy. Oh God.”

Emily jerks to her feet. She paces about furiously. Then she jumps.

There is a sound like the ringing of a bell. Chocolate bars fall from the air all around Emily. Emily seizes one, strips off the wrapper, and begins to chew frantically as she paces.

“It’s not very quiet for a quiet room,” Mama Carpenter admits. She’s leaning against the door behind Ink.

“Huh?”

Ink glances briefly at Mama Carpenter but she can’t take her eyes off of Emily for long.

“It’s supposed to be a quiet room,” Mama Carpenter says. “That’s why the walls are soft and there aren’t any toys. It’s so that you can settle down and learn the futility of protest.”

Mama Carpenter’s voice is apologetic.

“But you can’t really destimulate a Jumper, and I can’t afford a separate quiet room for each of you, so if you grow up bratty and intemperate, you’ll have to blame my underfunded orphan spirit-breaking budget.”

“It’s all right, ma’am,” says Ink. “I didn’t really want to be destimulated anyway. What is she jumping into?”

“It doesn’t matter, Ink. P-A-N-C-R-E-O-Z-Y-M-I-N-C-H-O-R-I-O-M-A-M-M-O-T-R-O-P-I-N-A-T-E. Ink.”

“You looked that up,” Ink accuses.

Mama Carpenter says, smugly, “It’s not your name, though. No one compounds random pituitary hormones when naming their child.”

“Enh,” shrugs Ink.

“It doesn’t matter. The jumpers say they’re popping invisible demons, but—well.”

Mama Carpenter raises her voice.

“It’s not very important to pop invisible demons, Emily, is it now? It doesn’t matter in the real world, you know. Not like algebra or spelling.”

Emily flushes bright red, crouches against the wall, and hides her face in her hands.

“I’m sorry, Mama Carpenter. I’m sorry. You’re totally right! It’s just . . . it’s just . . .”

Emily retreats to spelling.

“J-U-S-T. It’s just! It’s just that if I don’t pop the demons, they ally with the forces of Hell, and if I do pop them, I get prizes!”

There’s a flash of brilliance in Emily’s eyes.

“I bet I could pop one that would give me good grades on spelling quizzes! Q-U-I-Z-E-S. Quizzes!”

“Oh, Emily,” says Mama Carpenter. Her voice is sad.

Floor 93-DF: I took a picture of a camera. The camera, naturally, exploded.

For most of the day, I thought that was a special property of Floor 93-DF. But I asked Brad and he explained that it’s part of how cameras work in general. The infinite recursion of the photograph collapses the dimensions and makes a nanoscale white hole. It’s not unusual, any more than the infinite recursion effect you get with two mirrors is.

I thought Floor 93-DF was weird. But it’s not. There’s nothing wrong with it except that it is just too much like home.

“Invisible demons, you say?” Ink asks.

“They march around,” Emily says. “Then I jump. I pop them with my head! But when the Jump-trance fades, I stop seeing them. Then . . .”

“Then?”

“Then I kind of want to see them again,” Emily confesses. “Because I know they’re there. They’re always there. And I can pop them! It’s like a zit. It’s irresistible! You have to pop them! I have to pop them, Ink!”

Emily springs to her feet in a fury, charges halfway across the room, and jumps.

The bell rings furiously. A disembodied voice announces, “DOUBLE PRIZE—DRAGON!”

“Nice,” Mama Carpenter admits. She’s a little impressed despite herself.

“Dragons help you map the emptiness,” Emily says.

Emily looks pleadingly at Mama Carpenter.

“That’s like spelling, isn’t it?”

“It’s exactly the opposite of spelling,” Mama Carpenter says. “O-P-P-O-S-I-T-E. The opposite!”

“Is that how you spell opposite?” Ink asks, momentarily distracted from the meat of the story. “I mean, I would have said the same thing, but spelled out out loud like that it sounds wrong.”

“Don’t mess with Mama Carpenter when it comes to spelling,” says Mama Carpenter. “I don’t run a state-approved orphanage for nothing.”

Ink processes.

“This is a weird floor,” Ink says, in a small voice. “But it does have demons, so I guess it’s a step in the right direction.”

“Hon,” says Mama Carpenter, “if you’re looking for Hell, this world is pretty much it. Just ask Mephistopheles.”

“He’s here?”

Ink looks around frantically.

“. . . no,” says Mama Carpenter. “It’s a Faust reference.”

Mama Carpenter peers at Ink.

“What kind of family do you come from, Ink, where you can grow to twelve long years old and you don’t even know Doctor Faustus?”

“F-A-U-S-T-U-S,” spells Ink, in a desperate attempt to recover her intellectual cred.

“Honestly,” says Mama Carpenter. “You’re probably lucky you’re an orphan.”

Emily jumps.

Floor 93-DN: There was a Jesuit booth in the mall here. He was giving away free knotted whipcords, so that people could perform home mortification in honor of the Lord.

It was really really funny, but then it made me sad.

…

There was a beggar in the corner of the mall, and he’d been whipping himself there, which only made sense, because the mall was the closest thing to a home that that beggar had. And his back was leaking blood, great smeary streaks of it, and where he’d cut the muscles open he was growing angel’s wings.

I was scared for a long time, because I knew where the exit had to be in a world where self-mortification had temporal rather than spiritual benefits. Then I found out that it still counted even if you used a topical anesthetic so it wouldn’t hurt.

I’m going to try it soon, so I can move on.

Wish me luck.

“I’ve got to make dinner,” says Mama Carpenter. “So you two stay in here and you think about what you’ve done. And maybe if you’re willing to open up a little, Ink, and if you’ll can it with the jumping, Emily, I’ll bring you both a portion before bed.”

Emily looks appalled.

“You can’t threaten us with bed without supper! That’d be inhumane,” Emily says.

“You’ve got Jump food,” Mama Carpenter points out. “You can Jump yourself down a bloody Chicken Kiev if you want to.”

“Jump food makes me feel so guilty,” says Emily.

“If you don’t learn the futility of life,” says Mama Carpenter, “you’re never going to make it in the real world.”

Ink spells, clearly and precisely, “B-I-T-C-H.”

Mama Carpenter waits.

Ink hesitates.

“Well?” says Mama Carpenter.

Ink is mute. She doesn’t say the word, which means that technically she could have been misspelling some other word such as “Apples” instead of spelling “Bitch” correctly.

Mama Carpenter sighs.

Mama Carpenter shakes her head sadly. She walks out. She closes the door behind her. She slides the lock shut.

“Seems to me like Jumping is better,” Ink says.

“No,” says Emily. “It’s meaningless. I don’t want to do it any more, Ink. I mean, I really don’t. I just . . . it’s hard to stop. It’s shimmery and shiny and it draws you in and—”

Emily interrupts herself and switches topics completely.

“—you shouldn’t be so mean to Mama Carpenter, Ink. She’s a morally ambiguous character with both virtues and vices! That’s different from being evil. She just . . . she can’t help that we’re bad children.”

“I’m an explorer,” Ink says.

“That’s a phylum of the class ‘bad child,’” Emily proposes.

“. . . It seems like Jumping is better.”

Emily sighs. She sits down again. It looks like the Jumping fit is fading. Emily looks at her toes.

“I sometimes wish it were,” Emily says. “W-I-S-H. Wish. I sometimes wish that it were better. That maybe someday someone would come to me and say, ‘Thank you, Emily. Thank you. If you hadn’t Jumped so much, then I’d be dead now, or broken. It mattered that you popped all those demons. That sense of meaning you had when you stomped around and jumped—it was real. Thank you for giving yourself over to service.’”

Emily shrugs.

“But they won’t. They won’t ever. Because it’s just a stupid addiction. It’s just something I learned how to do and I’m not smart enough to stop.”

“I’m sorry,” Ink Catherly says.

Floor 93-DW: I told Mama Carpenter that finding Hell was more important than a stupid spelling bee. She told me that little girls who refuse to spell afflatus wind up in Hell soon enough.

It’s my own fault, I think. I didn’t realize I should be taking her literally until I saw the Gate That Proper Spellers Cannot Pass.

It was right there. I could see the flames. They shone like the stars in a winter sky. They shone like the dance of the angels. They were warm and bright and they kindled my heart, and I have been aching ever since.

I have decided to study l33t in case I find that gate again.

Emily looks up. “That demon there is the passage to the next level,” she says. She points languidly, then lets her hand fall.

“Next level?”

Emily shrugs a little.

“I don’t know what that means,” Emily admits. “I just thought it was neat. I don’t see them very often. They’re one of the ones I avoid, like the extra lives.”

Emily gives a pained half-smile. “I knew a Jumper who got an extra life once. It . . . it wasn’t very nice.”

Ink’s eyes are intent. “Where is the demon?”

Emily shrugs. “It doesn’t matter, remember?”

“Humor me.”

Emily stares at Ink.

“It’s short for Incompatible,” Ink says.

Emily is quiet and solemn. Her thoughts linger for a moment on Ink’s words.

Then Emily points, and Ink follows her finger, triangulating against where a hypothetical second Emily might point.

And Ink Jumps.

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