Archive for the ‘Series’ Category
Zoli Finds His Anima
Wednesday, April 16th, 2008
Zoli liked to hang around psychiatrists’ waiting rooms to hit on the low self-esteem chicks. Neurosis was his game and he was good at it, but he hadn’t counted on full-blown crazy.
“I’m telling you, I can’t date you. I’m here to find my animus,” the girl said. Her name was Padme? Pardoma? Ah, yes, Pandora.
Zoli wondered whether he should forsake Jungian practices altogether, but the paramythological interpretations were so convenient. Arguments could always be derailed away from his practical failings and into the terrain of the symbolic and abstract. Besides, sex with Freudians was kinkier than he cared for.
“I can be your animus, honey. For you, I can be anything you want,” he said.
The girl chuckled, shaking her head. “The animus isn’t a guy,” she said. “It’s the male aspect present in the collective subconscious of women”–she sounded like she was quoting something– “You should get in contact with your anima, honey, you might become less of a jerk.”
Zoli opened his mouth to proclaim himself innocent of jerkitude, but the woman scuttled closer on the bench and pressed his head against her chest. The proximity of the boob shocked him into silence.
“I’m opening your chakras,” the girl announced, caressing Zoli’s hair. “You have a beautiful anima, you simply need to let it out.”
The door of the office opened and the girl stood up, stepped in and left Zoli alone in the waiting room.
As soon as Zoli stepped out of the office, he noticed something was different. He turned heads. The women who looked at him weren’t prettier than the ones he usually attracted, but they seemed sharper, more together. Their eyes were everywhere. They held doors open for him.
The combination of gallantry and insult confused him.
He looked down at his body, fearing something drastic had happened to his sexual differentiation, but nothing had changed, as far as he could see. He was still a guy and he sighed with relief.
Suddenly, a knight appeared out of nowhere. Her hair flew in the wind, framing her face over her full-body armour. She shone like a diamond against the asphalt and skyscrapers. Without a word, she lifted Zoli up on her white horse and took him away.
End
P A S D
Tuesday, April 15th, 2008
To celebrate our first anniversary, each of us here at the Cabal has come up with a story beginning with a line kindly provided to us by the illustrious Jay Lake. Click the link at the bottom of the page to see how Alex, Dan, David, Edd, Kat, and Luc have handled the challenge, and check back tomorrow to see how Sara Genge winds up the series…
Zoli liked to hang around psychiatrists’ waiting rooms to hit on the low self-esteem chicks. It could take a couple days of hanging around, doing odd jobs, before she’d hit on an office where someone had brought in chicks, and not something useless like ducklings or a goat.
All the psychiatrists around the rim had the same group therapy rates: six hen chicks for general lack of affect, six rooster chicks for low self-esteem, four ducklings for anger management, a full grown chicken for alcohol abuse, a duck for drugs, a sheep or goat or dog for nightmares — because everybody’s nightmares were the same, and brought up things even psychiatrists didn’t want to face.
Zoli couldn’t stand any of it, the lying and turning away. “Post-Apocalyptic Stress Disorder” — as if that meant anything. As if the problem weren’t as obvious as the crater six-hunded miles wide and fifty deep. As obvious as all the people who didn’t exist anymore, all the craters they’d left in everyone’s lives.
The psychiatrists always had clothes to be darned, roofs to be shingled, water to be schlepped from the ration-well– finding odd jobs was easy. Finding male chicks wasn’t — self-esteem didn’t seem to be a popular problem anymore. And even the esteem chicks weren’t 100%, because most people weren’t any good at candling to tell which eggs were future roosters. It didn’t matter much to the farmers she competed with, but it mattered to Zoli.
She lived in a roofless warehouse within block of the edge where she’d emptied the ceiling-high shelves of high-def TVs, microwaves and robot vacuum cleaners and covered the sides with chicken wire to create multi-story coops.
The ammonia stink was so bad that her eyes watered and her nose ran constantly, and the coops were only half full. Every morning, she felt the crowing as something physical, a strong wind pushing against her. A few more months, and it would work. A few more months of hanging around waiting rooms with women whose every breath sounded like something ripping, men whose eyes never stopped moving, and she’d gather the generations she needed to complete the sound. Then the crowing would be a vast thing, and the world would shake like it had that day, and it would be enough. It would wake God, and then it would be over, and everything would be normal again.