Archive for the ‘Authors’ Category
Young Love, a tragedy
Monday, June 29th, 2009
(NOTE: If this were a movie it would probably be rated R)
“She’s from the edge of the field. The last row by the Fence!” Adam hissed.
“So?” Colin sneered, but he knew what Adam meant. Crystal could be, probably was, of mixed blood. Her mother looked like pure maize, but Crystal’s father could’ve been a grass, wheat, quinoa; anything, really. Any plant that could insinuate its pollen into Crystal’s mother’s private places could have jumped genomes, crossed chromosomes, done the dirty deed and fathered hybrids, hybrids that looked normal, but their own children would be … monsters. They might look like anything.
Colin knew this, but he forgot it all when he looked at her sturdy stem, her graceful leaves with their adorable tips, ever so slightly curved to left or right, her roots, beautiful in their symmetry. Love might not be stronger than prejudice, but lust sure was. What he wouldn’t do to get his pollen into her warm moist receptacles. A little pollen squirted out at the thought of the verdant Crystal and her divine form, and a breeze carried it to the fence and over.
Colin blushed to his roots. Had anyone seen? It seemed no one had. Whew! He was the only one who knew, and he would forget his inadvertent emission as soon as possible.
—
Delilah stretched her blossoms to catch the pollen ejaculated by the fine young maize plant she’d been ogling from the outboard side of the path. He must have been watching her. She had seen him staring at the flowers outside the Garden, and she was the most … inviting. She had pursed her petals at him, and had made him come with a gesture. How cool was that?!
Pollen grains drifted into several of Delilah’s flowers. They adhered, and their tubes began to grow. It was like nothing she’d ever felt before.
Soon Delilah’s ovaries swelled, gravid with chimerae. The seeds set, were fertile, and landed in due time on good, black soil. Alas, by the time they sprouted the following spring Delilah had moved on through the circle of life. She was nought but a withered brown nub. Colin had been harvested by a combine, and his aborted progeny were distributed among a few dozen cans of corn.
The end
*Yes, plant sex is weird and inventive. Successful reproduction between members of different species is just the beginning. Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_(biology)#Hybrid_plants.
There Was No Friday
Friday, June 26th, 2009
This story did not appear on Friday, June 26th. In a sense, it never appeared.
For me I bet it was about the same as it was for you … I went to bed on Thursday, but woke up on Saturday. It wasn’t a Rip Van Winkle kind of thing: Friday was just missing. Specifically, someone had taken it.
This wasn’t the kind of problem we usually dealt with at the Department of Time Misallocation. It was a relaxed job, usually, punctuated with coffee breaks and donuts. Every day we’d get a few cases of stolen moments, someone would lose an evening to drinking, and every fall there was always a flood of hapless dorks who didn’t remember what they had done with the hour of Daylight Savings Time they had saved in spring. It was never anything serious. Time isn’t really lost, after all: it’s just used. A little cognitive restructuring generally takes care of everything.
But this was different, because in that week there was no Friday. Someone had diverted the entire day, so paychecks had been missed, schedules had been ruptured, and millions of senior citizens were stuck with an extra day’s worth of prescription pills they didn’t know what to do with. It was a horrible theft, a breathtaking theft, an inexplicable and uninvestigatable impossibility. We spent months on it, actually, and between the feverish work pace and the lack of donuts, most of us lost between two and eight pounds. That was all the good that ever came out of it, though. When we closed the case for good a year after the fact, we’d gotten no closer than we’d been that mind-slapping Saturday morning.
If that had been all, if it had been one crazy incident, we could have put it behind us–but we know it will happen again. We don’t know when, or who, or how, but someone’s shown the way, and now everyone’s thinking about it: what they would do with it, an entire day to themselves, stolen and available for use at any time? It was like hiding a djinni in a backpack, like folding a summer meadow into the closet in the spare room. It was a little like eating the sun. What could you do with a stolen, unblemished day? Or more to the point: what couldn’t you?