The Nehalem Pyramid

Cigarette Paper

I ran my fingers along the surface of her skin gently, careful to touch but not press. The feeling was that of real skin. Her skin. So much so I got carried away. I applied too much pressure. A flame rippled out from my palm. It burned through her like through a cigarette paper. She curled and twisted and lifted off the bed. Bright light, a wisp of smoke, and then it was over. I gasped, and my gasp scattered her ashes around the room, so that if you looked you wouldn’t have seen she was there.

Based on a True Story

A clump of popsicle sticks and rubber bands somehow became animate and set out to free solo El Capitan. It did well until two thirds of the way up, when It was caught in an ice storm. The cold made its rubber bands brittle and they snapped and the clump was undone and the broken bits of rubber and wood were scattered. Someone would’ve gone out to recover the body, such as it was, but only one person knew anything about it, and he couldn’t be bothered.

I havn't been keeping up on posting my little bits from Mastodon, so for the next eleven days I'll post one.

I'm not really happy about it. My rule for this blog has been to post a story once every five days. I've also been collecting these little Mastodon droppings into groups of five to post. The problem is that I have eleven and I want to get them cleared out, which would require two Mastodon droppings posts back to back, which is bad enough, but then there'd be one left dangling.

None of this is important, I just need to explain why I'm not doing the thing I said I'd do.

It's not like a post a day is spammy.

Spelunking in Bed

One year, when I was nine, I missed Thanksgiving because I was sick. I was stuck in bed with a high fever. I could hear everyone in the dining room eating and having a good time. Thanksgiving has always been my favorite holiday, and I wished I had an appetite, or felt like getting out of bed.

I decided to go spelunking in my comforter. When I was little I would put a blanket over my head and pretend I was exploring some deep dark cave. Down in the cave I found the usual things, a chamber of ice, a pool of magma, a monster, a pretty girl, that sort of thing. Then I found my head. It was giant, the size of a two story house. I crawled in through the mouth and proceeded on my hands and knees. It was hot and moist and dark, and the further I went the more cramped it was until I was on the brink of panic and tried to turn around, but the way back was blocked. I ran on all fours down the passage like a dog chasing a rabbit—or like a rabbit running from a dog, more like. Then, without seeing it coming, I found myself in the most beautiful place I’d ever seen, and I decided never to leave.

Clouds Don’t Evaporate

I caught a cloud that looked just like my son did when he was two years old. I took it home and fed it ice cream. Just like my son used to, it would cross its eyes in anticipation as I brought the spoon to its mouth. But it was just a cloud, and it evaporated.

Blackness Or My Reflection, However You Want to See It

One moment I was watching the countryside go by from the train. My mouth was full of gauze and the novocaine had worn off, but gazing out the window helped, and luckily I had a percocet in me. The percocet must’ve kicked in quick because next moment there was only blackness out the window. I looked around; there were jackets on the seats, but no passengers. I staggered through each car, but found no one. I stepped off the train into mud up to my ankles. No one, and black as far as I could see.

Not Like a Caravaggio Painting

Guy was out to a business lunch, which was going quite well. He was going to be significantly richer after this deal. Richer. By normal people’s standards Guy was already rich. By the standards of the well-to-do, even. Still, if you were to ride in an elevator with Guy, you wouldn’t think he was that rich, a successful lawyer, maybe. Only if you knew what to look for would you get a sense of how rich Guy was. But, if you weren’t the sort of person who knew what to look for, you wouldn’t be riding in an elevator with Guy.

Guy had had a couple Kobe sliders and a couple whiskeys at lunch, and now he needed to pee. The restaurant was the necessary upscale affair required for such a business meeting, but it was dressed up like a dive, an exquisite hole in the wall, a greasy spoon, but one as painted by Caravaggio. The restroom was just the same, looking like a little shithole— except: cloth towels to dry your hands instead of paper ones, toilets that had never seen shit, wet wipes on offer in the stalls….

Guy did his business at the urinal and washed up at the sink, a standard cheap white porcelain sink like you’d find in any gas station bathroom— except the water came on when you turned it on, and went off when you turned it off, and you could actually get hot water out of it, too. He was drying off his hands and daydreaming of all the money he was about to make when a toilet flushed in a stall behind him. He had thought he was alone and wondered: He wasn’t talking to himself, was he, when he thought no one was there?

Guy tossed his towel in the hamper and made for the door, ready to get back out to the table and seal the deal, but the door stopped shut with a dense metal clack, and then the room spun around, and where he once stood on the floor facing the door, now he faced the floor and stood on nothing, the toes of his shoes frantically scraping across the clean, glossy bathroom tile. He reached out to catch himself with his hands, but only the tips of his middle fingers could just brush against the floor. He tried to kick off the door but couldn’t reach. He tried to crawl forward but the man’s legs straddling his either side blocked him. He had no leverage and no traction. He dangled helplessly, almost in a state of repose. He clawed at the rope, but if you don’t get your fingers in between the rope and your neck right at first, then you never will. He tried everything he could, but none of it helped… but it didn’t stop him from trying… but trying didn’t help. The man, his killer, had been waiting, had had the advantage of picking the moment to strike. His killer had the upper hand. Guy was used to being the one with the upper hand. He was so used to it that he mistook himself for something special— especially smart, especially cunning. But no, he had just always had the upper hand, and the one with the upper hand wins.

It didn’t take long for Guy to pass out. His life didn’t flash before his eyes, he didn’t think of his wife or his three children, he didn’t think of that ex-lover from years ago that he had been secretly still carrying a flame for up even until now. Those things only happen to survivors, memories spliced in after the danger has passed. For Guy there was just struggle, then struggle’s end.

The killer held Guy like that to a count of 300 Mississippi. Quite a workout. If you’ve been looking for a good body weight exercise for your lower back, this is it. At 255 Mississippi, Guy shit his pants. The killer was tempted to drop him then, but he persisted. When he finally made it to 300, he dragged Guy to the stall he’d been waiting in and put him on the toilet. He checked his pulse, and but god damn it if Guy wasn’t still ticking, if only weakly. The killer gripped Guy by the jaw—his index finger running across Guy’s lips—and pierced the arteries on either side of the throat in one thrust of his knife. He tipped Guy’s head to one side to keep himself from getting all bloddy as Guy drained from the neck. He then put his hand down the front of Guy’s $500 white linen button-up shirt— indistinguishable from a $5 white button-up shirt, unless you’re the right sort of person. He tested Guy’s pulse on his chest— he was terrible at finding a pulse on the wrist. A minute went by without a discernable heartbeat.

Guy had been his first hit. It was nothing like the movies. There was no drama. It was ugly and boring and gross. Shit, piss, blood, saliva, mucus. It was like taking apart a chicken, except heavier. It was uncomfortable, intimate. He had hoped he wouldn’t have to touch anyone, had taken great pains to not touch anyone, but on the other side of this thing he felt he might as well have blown Guy. In fact, if he could’ve done that instead for the same money, it would’ve been hands down a more pleasant experience for all conscerned. But he couldn’t. And as gross and cumbersome and awkward and risky as the work was, the money was better.

Miss Crachen’s Camera

By day, Miss Crachen was a second grade school teacher; by night she was an inventor, though not a productive one. She would give up on an invention once she saw that it would work, being interested only in the surprising, not the obvious. Having the keen mind that she did, one able to quickly see the implications of things, this meant that she didn’t often get to the point of even building a prototype to test. The problem was aggravated by the fact that Miss Crachen was arrogant—an affliction not untypical amongst people with keen minds—and so tended to trust the fullness of her understanding too much. All her life people tried to correct Miss Crachen’s arrogance. They would tell her, “You think you know everything, but you don’t. You think ‘this’, but actually it’s ‘that.’” Unfortunately they were always wrong. “This” was, in fact, “this”, not “that”, so their attempts to correct her arrogance only reinforced it.

Miss Crachen would receive an idea for an invention while cooking, or cleaning, or taking a bath, or on the drive to or from work. The idea would fall in her lap all on its own, and she would pick it up, she would look at it, examine it, turn it over, take it apart. When she could see the whole thing, hold it in her mind all at once, she’d throw it away. Once she’d eaten the flesh, she would discard the rind, and meanwhile five or six fresh, ripe ideas would have fallen into her lap.

Then, one morning, while buttering a slice of toast, an idea came to her for a very high-speed video camera, and this proved to be a very difficult invention. An artichoke, with not much flesh, and difficult to eat. It was difficult enough that it kept her wrestling with it. She couldn’t simply devour it like lesser ideas, and so she turned out an actual prototype— not her first, but one of only a very few.

Miss Crachen estimated the time resolution of her camera at roughly one trillion frames a second, or, to put it more precisely, she estimated the time between two successive frames was close to a trillionth of a second. This is an important distinction. There are what seem to be very high-speed cameras giving that kind of time resolution, but while it may be sort of fair to describe them as capable of capturing a trillion frames a second, you cannot honestly say that the time between two of their successive frames is a trillionth of a second. They work by capturing periodic phenomena, a laser repeatedly firing for instance, at slightly different moments, and then putting the frames together, kind of like stop motion animation combined with time-lapse photography. It could take minutes, or hours, or more to capture a thousand frames, whereas Miss Crachen’s high-speed camera was straightforwardly a high-speed camera, and if it ran for a second it would capture a trillion frames.

The first test was conducted in her living room. She set up a tent around her couch and smoked several cigarettes inside it, then she fired a laser mounted on the armrest of her couch and filmed its progress with her prototype camera. She filmed for only 125 millionths of a second but captured over two hours worth of footage played back at a hundred frames a second. Once the test had been performed—a fraction of a blink of an eye—Miss Crachen eagerly played back the result.

Miss Crachen had thought it would be cute if she were in the frame for the test, so the first thing she saw on her laptop when the video started playing was what looked like a still photograph of her smiling face. After several minutes of nothing happening, a little fleck of red appeared on the right side of the frame. Miss Crachen cheered the little fleck on as it slowly—agonizingly slowly—stretched out, but she ran out of enthusiasm when the beam was as long as the breadth of her thumbnail.

She could’ve quit watching at that point—the test had been confirmed a success—but she felt the diligent thing to do was to watch the whole video, to see with her own eyes the red thread of light’s journey across the frame. She took down the tent, microwaved a bag of popcorn, and made herself comfortable on the couch. For forty minutes she watched the video play only out of the corner of her eye while she snacked on popcorn and dinked around on her phone, but then something in the video moved suddenly, catching her eye. She looked from the little screen to the bigger one. She saw her face frozen like in a photograph—as before—and she saw the laser rolling steadily onward—again, as it had been—but over her shoulder she saw the zipper on the tent being undone shakily, in fits and starts, but swiftly, as if it had been filmed at normal speed. When a crack of a few inches had been made in the tent flap, in they all poured like baby spiders bursting out of their egg sac, swarming over every surface and blackening the very air: Monsters.

The It

If you see it, you’ll always see it. You’ll try to ignore it, knowing as you do how much easier it is to get along if you don’t see it, but ignoring is seeing, and it will be so much harder to get along.

Breakfast with Grandma

I found my grandma standing in front of my open refrigerator door one morning, a gallon of milk tipped all the way back, guzzling it fast and not spilling a drop. It’s funny that that’s the thing that struck me most at the time, how she was just chugging this gallon of milk without losing any. My grandma had died going on ten years before, so you’d think seeing her there at all would be itself the big shocker that morning, but no, at least not at first.

When she was done with the milk she tossed the empty jug over her shoulder and started in on the eggs. It was Sunday morning; I go grocery shopping on Saturdays. She picked a good time to stop by if she was hungry. She ate each of the dozen eggs in one bite, shell and all, and tossed the carton over her shoulder. It landed next to the milk jug, in a little pile she was making, along with an emptied styrofoam tray of ground beef, an emptied jar of jam, and a wrapper for a brick of medium cheddar cheese. I have to imagine it took her some time to chew through all the cheese, it was a new one.

I didn’t say anything to her, and she didn’t notice me. I went back to my bedroom and paced around, forgetting for the moment that I’d long since kicked the nail biting habit. I didn’t believe it was really my grandma. My eyes told me it was my grandma, she had my grandma’s skin, my grandma’s hair, she wore my grandma’s clothes, her shoes, her pearls, her perfume. But some other sense, one I can’t name, was screaming at me with at least as much certainty that this was not my grandma, that my grandma was dead and even if she wasn’t, the thing in my kitchen wasn’t her. I’d gotten up that morning to find a spider in my kitchen the size of my dead grandmother, far too big to put outside without touching it, far too big to smash. When it was done with my fridge and my pantry, what would it eat next?

My phone was charging on my nightstand. My wallet was there with it, which was lucky since I normally keep it in a dish on the counter in the kitchen. I took them both and cut a hole in my bedroom window screen with the nail file end of a pair of clippers from my headboard. I jumped out the window. I guess this isn’t my house anymore, I thought. Surprisingly, I didn’t feel much of any way about leaving my house behind with nothing but the clothes on my back, my phone, and my wallet. I was a little irked about the groceries, since I’d just gone to the trouble of getting them. My car though… there was no way to get to the keys without going through the kitchen. I left it behind. It hurt, it really hurt to leave the car behind like that, like I was leaving a friend behind, or no, not a friend, a pet. Someone who needed me. And after a few days of walking everywhere, it hurt a lot more.