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================================================
InterText Vol. 3, No. 6 / November-December 1993
================================================

  Contents

    FirstText: I Ought (Not) To Be in Pictures ...... Jason Snell

  Short Fiction
  
    Sanford's Calico_.......................... Andrew J. Solberg_

    Newtopia_......................................... Aaron Lyon_

    Cube_........................................... Patrick Hurh_

    Manna_.......................................... D.C. Bradley_

    Sooner or Later_.................................. Eric Skjei_

    The Burdens of Love_.......................... Chris Kmotorka_
    
....................................................................
    Editor                                     Assistant Editor
    Jason Snell                                    Geoff Duncan
    jsnell@etext.org                       gaduncan@halcyon.com
....................................................................
         Send subscription requests, story submissions,
            and correspondence to intertext@etext.org
....................................................................
  InterText Vol. 3, No. 6. InterText (ISSN 1071-7676) is published 
  electronically on a bi-monthly basis. Reproduction of this 
  magazine is permitted as long as the magazine is not sold 
  (either by itself or as part of a collection) and the entire 
  text of the issue remains intact. Copyright 1993, 1994 Jason 
  Snell. Individual stories Copyright 1993 by their original 
  authors.
....................................................................


  FirstText: I Ought (Not) To Be in Pictures  by Jason Snell
============================================================

  So I get this piece of electronic mail the other day from a 
  friend of mine in Los Angeles, someone I know from back in 
  college at UC San Diego. The mail essentially said: "I opened my 
  December issue of _MacUser_ magazine, the one that just came in 
  the mail, and found a picture of you staring back at me!"

  Then I got mail from someone else, this one a person in Illinois 
  on an electronic mailing list I subscribe and contribute to. The 
  message was the same. Slowly, the recognition is trickling in.

  Yes, that's right. A picture of me is probably sitting, right 
  now, in most big bookstores around the United States. For anyone 
  to see. If my picture hadn't been appearing in the PostScript 
  edition of _InterText_ from the very beginning, I'd be even more 
  startled.

  How did this begin? As I've said in previous _FirstText_ 
  columns, my job this summer was as an intern at a computer 
  magazine in the Bay Area. That magazine was _MacUser_, and I had 
  a great time writing and researching stories there. In fact, I'm 
  still writing freelance stories that will be appearing in future 
  issues.

  Right before I left, two events conspired to bring me -- and 
  _InterText_ -- to the pages of _MacUser_. First off, I was asked 
  to write a sidebar about using PostScript to distribute 
  publications. Then the editors wanted to use a cover from 
  _InterText_ as an example, which is why the Dec. 1993 issue of 
  _MacUser_ includes the cover of Vol. 3, No. 3 of _InterText_ on 
  page 165.

  Second, the magazine's managing editor decided to write her 
  column about the magazine's interns. So before we left, she 
  interviewed us and arranged to have our pictures taken. As a 
  result, my image -- in living color, a little different from how 
  it appears in the black- and-white pages of _InterText_ -- is on 
  page 8 of that same issue.

  The up side of all this is that hopefully our exposure in 
  _MacUser_ will bring _InterText_ some new readers, which is the 
  best part of publicity.

  The down side? I write _another_ column about free publicity for 
  _InterText_, something I've done plenty of already. Which brings 
  my discussion of _MacUser_, my articles for them, and my photo 
  to a close.


  If I could pick _two_ things that I think I've heard too much 
  about (other than my columns about more exposure for _InterText_ 
  and my photo), they're hypertext and new ways of getting 
  information on the Internet.

  I've heard for far too long about hypertext's amazing uses, and 
  how it will be a revolutionary concept as technology advances. 
  And for the most part I was skeptical. At the same time, I've 
  read a million different articles about the Internet and the 
  different and neat ways you can get information. First it's the 
  net itself, then it's transferring files via the FTP protocol. 
  Then it's using gopher. Then making a search using WAIS. How 
  about MUDs and IRC? (Parenthetical note on the Thesis Saga: My 
  thesis is definitely about the addictive possibilities of such 
  items as MUDs, IRC, Bolo, XTrek and the like. If you've used any 
  of these a lot, or know someone who has, send me some mail. I'd 
  like to interview you.) And, of course, the World-Wide Web -- 
  which has the advantage of being both a new method of getting 
  information _and_ a hypertext-based system.

  Well, this past month I finally got direct Internet access, 
  instead of having to dial up a UNIX system and entering all of 
  my commands through the command line interface. As a result, 
  I've finally gotten to explore some of the Internet resources I 
  really couldn't have explored easily from my limited vantage 
  point.

  The first night I played with the connection, I spent hours 
  using a program called NCSA Mosaic, which connected me to that 
  same World- Wide Web. And I must say I was impressed -- 
  instantly there were graphics appearing on my screen, sections 
  of text I could click on which would take me to whole other 
  areas of the Internet.

  Not too long after, with a little encouragement from Joe 
  Germuska at Northwestern University, I had turned out a 
  prototype _InterText_ archive on the World-Wide Web, complete 
  with an _InterText_ author index with links to the issues of 
  _InterText_ that appear on gopher.

  Not to bore you too much with technology, but the bottom line 
  here is that the magazine is now accessible to the people who 
  use Mosaic and other programs to use the World-Wide Web. And as 
  technology advances, _fully-formatted_ issues of _InterText_ may 
  also be available on-line. We'll just have to see. No matter 
  what, this is a whole new way for people to access _InterText_. 
  If you're able to access the World-Wide Web (ask a system 
  administrator if you don't know how; the key is that you pretty 
  much have to have a _direct_ Internet connection), check it out. 
  In Web parlance, our "home page" is located at

  file://network.ucsd.edu/intertext/other_formats/HTML/ITtoc.html.

  That's all I have to say for this column, the last I'll write 
  for 1993. It's hard to believe the time has passed, but as I 
  said back in January, 1993 was definitely for a limited time 
  only. And now that time has gone.

  Enjoy this issue's stories -- lots of science fiction, but also 
  a couple stories very much grounded in reality and the present. 
  They should all be entertaining.

  See you in 1994.


  Sanford's Calico  by Andrew J. Solberg
========================================
...................................................................
  * Pet lovers understand that getting a new animal can be a 
  crapshoot -- you might end up with a great animal, but you might 
  get a dud. Of course, a dud may not be the worst-case 
  scenario... *
...................................................................

  Sanford and I both work at the local lab; he's a computer jock 
  and I do research in microelectronics. We rarely cross paths in 
  the office, but we've remained close since college. For 
  instance, every Friday we make a point of going to Garvey's Pub 
  to drink and talk.

  It was on one such expedition that we spoke of Sanford's calico.

  He had gotten the cat recently, apparently from an animal 
  shelter in Phoenix. He had paid for the papers and shots out of 
  his own pocket, and though the cost was only a fraction of that 
  one might pay in a pet store, it put a serious dent in his 
  paycheck. Sanford claimed not to mind, however, as the calico 
  was delightful company and easy to care for.

  It was an outdoor cat, according to my friend, and it preferred 
  stalking about under the hedges of his backyard to loafing on a 
  sofa all day. Sanford would let it outside in the morning when 
  he went to work, and when he returned it would be standing by 
  the door, meowing amiably and ready for a good scratching. The 
  eternal bachelor, Sanford found this very pleasant.

  It seems the calico (Sanford, eccentric as always, refused to 
  give the beast a name) was something of a hunter. More often 
  than not, Sanford pulled into the driveway only to find a mouse 
  or small bird lying dead and bloodied on the front stair -- 
  presumably as a gift for him. Sanford decided that, for all its 
  barbarism, this little ritual was incredibly cute and he would 
  reward the purring kitty with a tin of sardines for its trouble.

  Did I mention how strange Sanford is? I should have.

  At any rate, the calico, being as subject to Pavlovian dynamics 
  as any other creature, accelerated its campaign against the 
  local fauna (and occasionally flora) in hopes of receiving its 
  just piscine desserts every day. This stratagem seemed to work 
  well -- the cat got its fish, and Sanford got a regular supply 
  of deceased delicacies on his walk. Sanford found this to be a 
  scream, and was considering keeping a kind of scrapbook of the 
  calico's "trophies." He thought nothing of the rapid depredation 
  of the local wildlife population.

  As a kind of afterthought, Sanford mentioned that on the 
  previous morning the calico had dragged in a mutant mouse. It 
  looked perfectly normal in every respect, except that its tail 
  was scaled like a lizard's, and blue.


  The following Monday Sanford did not come to work. He was also 
  not there on Tuesday, and the word came down the pipeline that 
  he was AWOL. When he didn't show on Wednesday, I decided to 
  check up on him.

  That evening I pulled my rebuilt Catalina into Sanford's drive 
  and parked it. The house looked like a sepulcher: shades drawn, 
  no lights, papers piling on the lawn. It looked like Sanford had 
  just pulled up roots and left. However, if you knew Sanford like 
  I know Sanford, you would know that Sanford never leaves home 
  without putting a tailor's mannequin in the window, presumably 
  to ward off really stupid and myopic burglars. I climbed to the 
  front door and rang the bell.

  I had barely released the button when the door opened a crack. A 
  moment later it was flung full open, and Sanford was dragging me 
  inside. "In! Quick!" he hissed, and slammed the door.

  Sanford looked terrible. He had huge, dark circles under his 
  eyes, and the stain on his lips told me he had taken up 
  chain-smoking again. His T-shirt had mustard stains on it, and 
  he wasn't wearing anything else. In short, he looked like a body 
  found in a ditch, and I told him so. He seemed not to hear me.

  "Anybody see you? Anybody follow you here?" His eyes glittered 
  at me in the near-darkness. I shook my head. He looked relieved.

  "Jesus. You don't know what I've been through, man..." He looked 
  like he was going to collapse. I ushered him into his own living 
  room and made room on a recliner by clearing away a stack of 
  newspapers. I knew where everything was in his kitchen, so I 
  fixed him some coffee and a sandwich and tried to make him 
  comfortable.

  He looked a lot better after eating something. I pushed some 
  comic books off the sofa and sat down to watch him. He took a 
  long pull at the coffee and sat back heavily into the 
  comfortable chair. "Sheez..." he breathed, closing his eyes.

  At that moment there came a noise at the back door. It was a 
  grating sound, of something rough being dragged across something 
  metal. Claws on the screen door -- oh! The calico. "Shall I let 
  it in?" I asked, rising from my seat. I stopped when I saw the 
  look of horror on Sanford's face.

  "No! Don't! The cat... who _knows_ what it's gotten into? It's 
  not safe, man! Don't let it in!" It poured out in a rush of 
  panic. I got him some more coffee and tried to calm him down. 
  When he seemed a bit less jumpy, I asked him to tell me what 
  this was all about. He looked at me with the unwilling stare of 
  a man forced to relive his worst nightmare.

  "They're in the freezer."


  There were three things in the freezer. One was a pound of 
  ground chuck roast that had been there long enough to be harder 
  than a brick. The other two were not hamburgers. They were 
  sealed in zip- lock baggies.

  The first contained a bird. It was the size and shape of a 
  sparrow, but its feathers were all colors of the rainbow. Its 
  beak was curved slightly like a finch's, and it had eight talons 
  on each claw. Its tongue, protruding slightly, would have been 
  six inches long if extended fully. It was clearly not a local 
  bird.

  The remaining specimen was beyond "not local." It was not 
  terrestrial.

  It was the size of a large rat. It looked something like a wolf 
  spider, but stretched to the length of a shoe. It had thick 
  tannish bristles with spots, like a leopard's. At the end of its 
  body was a vicious-looking stinger. Its grasping palps were 
  tipped with what can only be described as three fingers and an 
  opposing thumb.

  Both creatures were severely mauled. There was no question that 
  the calico, fearless feline hunter, had been on one hell of a 
  safari.

  "Where'd they come from? What are they?" Sanford wanted to know. 
  I couldn't help him. But the calico could.

  "Oh, no," said Sanford, backing up. "I'm not letting that cat 
  back in here."


  The cat chewed noisily on its Tender Vittles. Sanford looked 
  strung out as an addict, and he sucked on his cigarettes like 
  they were full of gold dust. We watched the cat eat, and waited.

  Eventually the calico finished, burped, and curled up on the 
  carpet to sleep as if nothing had happened.

  Sanford and I exchanged glances.

  We watched the cat all through the night.


  The next morning Sanford gingerly fed the cat some sardines. It 
  mewed happily as the can opener ran, and gobbled the fish down 
  as soon as they were under its nose. Then we let it out into the 
  yard.

  It seemed to have a standard routine of yard traversal: it would 
  sniff every plant and pebble in turn, as if conducting an 
  inventory. Then it would hunker down in the shade under the 
  bushes and lie in wait for prey. There in the shadows, it looked 
  like a little tiger. We watched it carefully from the bathroom 
  window with a pair of binoculars.

  Over the next few hours, the calico made several attempts to bag 
  a cardinal which was trying to hunt up grubs on the ground. The 
  cat would dash out from cover, a blur of color, but the cardinal 
  would swoop out of danger just in time. The hunter would then 
  pretend indifference, and would saunter casually back to its 
  hiding place, as if preparing for a lazy afternoon nap. Fifteen 
  minutes later, it would try again, with similarly poor results.

  Around 12:30 the calico slipped through surveillance.

  "Where'd it go?" Sanford asked. I took the glasses, but the cat 
  was not in the yard. I berated him for letting it get away 
  without seeing which fence it had jumped, but he insisted that 
  it has simply disappeared. Naturally, I didn't believe him.

  "Alright then, Mr. Know-It-Fucking-All," he blustered. "_You_ 
  track the little bastard tomorrow." That gave me an idea.

  That evening the calico left a gift on the stairs.

  Owls don't have fangs, do they?


  The next day saw a repeat of the previous ritual, with one 
  exception. The technology level of calico-tracking had advanced 
  a century or so.

  We had fitted a small signal emitter, courtesy of the lab and 
  its generous after-hours policy, to the cat's collar. We had 
  also borrowed an oscilloscope, a receiver, an amplifier, a 
  multiband gain unit, several i/o boards, and the most advanced 
  terminal from my division. Sanford's bathroom looked like 
  Arecibo, and we could have heard a spider piss if it didn't put 
  the seat up. Ah, modern science.

  The cat went through its standard motions of local hunting, the 
  results matching well with the previous day's foray. It bumbled 
  around the yard until almost three in the afternoon before 
  vanishing.

  We peered at the screen. One second ago, the cat had been 
  licking its paws in the middle of the lawn. The next moment it 
  was simply not there. The computer confirmed what we thought we 
  had hallucinated: the cat had made an instantaneous translation 
  out of the range of our equipment.

  Well, not quite instantaneous. A rigorous analysis of the 
  shifting of the signal wavelengths showed that, at the moment of 
  transmission loss, the calico had been receding at a rate just 
  under the speed of light.

  The calico did not return that day. However, Sanford and I were 
  awakened just after midnight by the familiar scraping at the 
  door screen, and we admitted the wayward cat. It bore with it a 
  small creature, something like a cross between a parakeet and an 
  opossum. It was thoroughly mauled, and quite dead. Further 
  investigation showed that its left ear was pierced with a ring. 
  The ring held a series of round metallic tags with bizarre 
  spidery markings.

  It took two pots of coffee to calm Sanford down.


  Sanford got rid of the cat. I don't know how, or where it wound 
  up, and I'm sure I don't want to know. Science is good for lots 
  of things, but there are some mysteries that don't bear looking 
  into.

  I live in Melbourne now, designing printed circuit boards. It's 
  kind of dreary work, but it's a long way away from Arizona.

  I figure when the aliens come to find the predator that has been 
  hauling off their pets, this is the _last_ place they'll look.


  Andrew J. Solberg  (caz@owlnet.rice.edu)
------------------------------------------
  
  Andrew J. Solberg is a construction contractor in Houston, 
  Texas, The Land That Culture Forgot. He got hooked on electronic 
  media in college but stubbornly refused to drop it for more 
  adult pursuits such as bowling or grumbling. He enjoys writing 
  as well as playing bridge, listening to live music, and tromping 
  around the United States. One day he hopes to revert to a life 
  of violence and savagery.


  Newtopia  by Aaron Lyon
=========================
...................................................................
  * The dirty, dystopian future of cyberpunk writers is so popular 
  now. But if the future ends up looking more like
  _Leave it to Beaver_ than _Neuromancer_, should we consider
  ourselves lucky or cursed? *
...................................................................

  "Next!"

  Jeez. Finally. As I enter the white room alone, three short, 
  uniformed men display practiced grins, gleaming straight teeth 
  framed by dark, oily skin. My luggage has preceded me, and lies 
  apparently unopened on the plastic table -- the only furniture. 
  Two video cameras glare ostentatiously from the eaves like Poe's 
  ravens.

  "Anything to declare?" One agent opens my suitcase and deftly 
  upends the contents on the table. The next employs a metal 
  detector like a kitchen tool, stirring my egg white socks and 
  flipping my sausages. A similar metal detector was needed to 
  eliminate the threat of the brass rivets on my 501's when I 
  wasn't able to pass the walk- thru test a second time.

  "Are you taking any prescription medications?" Another agent 
  devours my overnight bag, snorting my talc, drinking my shampoo, 
  chewing my aspirin, and gnawing my hairbrush. Finally, sniffing 
  my Speed Stick and giving my shaving cream Indian rug burn in an 
  attempt to unscrew either end, he turns his attention to his 
  clipboard.

  "Please turn your pockets inside out." The third agent seems 
  especially interested in my pens, taking them apart and flexing 
  the springs suspiciously. I find nothing at all in my pockets, 
  having already emptied them before the metal detector and EPD 
  scan, and having vacuumed them carefully before this trip.

  EPD (Emotional Photograph Detectography) is an emerging science 
  wherein a selection of emotional elementals, the basic 
  components of all emotions, are measured. Some of the more 
  elusive emotional components exist for mere nanoseconds, and can 
  only be detected using EPD. The resulting measurements are then 
  interpreted as a concrete report of the subject's psychic 
  personality. For example, violent criminals should show 
  exaggerated hatred and pain elementals, while the ideal, bovine 
  citizen displays a healthy mix of happiness, sadness, and fear.

  The EPD scan had encouraged me with its accurate reading of my 
  normally cool emotional complexion. EPD, despised in the West 
  but employed in Newtopia, leaves much to be desired in a psychic 
  evaluator for one simple reason: criminals are commonly more 
  together than straight folk. But I had needed the recommendation 
  -- my long hair is a serious warning sign to these people. This 
  fact is duly noted on several pages of my passport in large red 
  letters: "S.H.I.T." (Suspected Hippie In Transit.)


  Notice the way my hands shake when I tell you this. A typically 
  heavy storm thrashes the hotel windows rhythmically with its 
  wrinkled fingers. I'm on the 60th floor of this 72-floor steel 
  and glass monster, slowly getting sick from the motion -- the 
  hotel is a giant pine branch stuck in the old tar of a derelict 
  rolling gas station. My makeshift pendulum, a pencil suspended 
  from the lamp by a complimentary piece of thread, nervously 
  etches a widening oval on hotel stationery. Huge, horizontal 
  claws of lightening, no longer shy to be seen by my bloodshot 
  eyes, scratch the paint off my retinas, leaving the white of 
  true power etched into my vision.

  I'm jet-lag wired. My watch delivers its one-liner with a 
  straight face, "Sixteen thirty-three."

  "Stop, you're killin' me!" I chuckle rhythmically, like a 
  woodpecker finding lunch. My gaze turns to the bathroom and I 
  stop giggling abruptly.

  A flash of lightening lasts mere nanoseconds, but this one turns 
  from white to yellow as it lights up the shower curtain like a 
  Las Vegas night. I whip around, jaw snapping into place a bit 
  late, and gape. I've seen plenty of esses blow in the past, but 
  this one flares into a screaming white magnesium celebration of 
  the universe and my small brain. Hallelujah! The red neon tubes 
  explode, exhaling their precious cargo like an ejaculation. Tiny 
  bits of burning sign dive off toward the street below in a 
  shower of sparks like space flotsam entering the atmosphere. The 
  skin on my chest tingles with electricity.

  The storm is eerily over and the building rests, perhaps 
  sleeping, exhausted from its dance in the primal rain.

  "Sixteen thirty-two?" I check my watch again. Then my stomach 
  checks in with me, hunger overpowering my nausea. I find the 
  thought of a food-finding mission risky, but room service is 
  downright inhospitable.

  " 'Adventure' is my middle name," I say as I grab my card key 
  and sunglasses.

  Outside the hotel, the hot, thick air presses against my face 
  like a wet blanket. The jungle doesn't stop at the city limits 
  like a timid forest creature, but spills out of cement troughs 
  throughout the city. Youths on motor scooters choke the streets, 
  buzzing from mall to mall with their T-shirts on backward. 
  Police adorn every corner, shouting nonsense over cellular 
  phones, 9mm handguns and black batons painfully visible. Three 
  million people slap the sidewalk with floppy sandals -- a 
  percussive symphony in the heavy air.

  A stocky blond man emerges backwards from a doorway in an office 
  building. His soiled cotton slacks and sweat-stained shirt 
  distinguish him from the throng as much as his fair complexion 
  and relative stature. The stubble on this rube's cheeks is days 
  old. An irate woman, a madam with white pancake and rouge, 
  follows him out onto the sidewalk, ranting incoherently. A tan 
  micro-van screeches to a halt in the middle of the street, 
  pig-tail radio antennae wagging, halting traffic in both 
  directions. The front and back doors pop open and steady streams 
  of small, uniformed men pour impossibly from the tiny vehicle, 
  like circus clowns. A captain, adorned with gold buttons and 
  megaphone, becomes ringmaster of this grotesque circus, as the 
  acrobatic constables perform fearless feats of brutality, 
  quickly subduing the golden-maned lion. More cops rush 
  needlessly to the scene from adjacent corners, knuckles white on 
  their batons.

  "Bad foreigner! Get in van!" shouts the ringmaster. "Everything 
  OK now. Nothing to look at. Everybody scram!"

  "Baby crocodile crawled out of the sewer yesterday, damned if it 
  didn't bite my landlady!" says a nonplussed pedestrian, 
  continuing his broken stride.

  "Don't say. Good things come in small packages. Remember that 
  guy with 93 outstanding parking tickets? Just got nipped for 36 
  grand and three visits!"

  "Ouch, ouch!"

  "Smile when you say that."


  Newtopia employs corporal punishment to achieve its rigid social 
  order. Miscreants and nogoodniks are dealt with swiftly and 
  effectively according to a graduated scale of evil-doing. 
  Jaywalking, spitting, and littering bring a quick five hundred 
  dollar fine, as does the use of a public toilet without flushing 
  afterwards. More serious crimes are punished by fining and 
  beating the guilty individual. Tampering with a telephone on the 
  subway, peeing in an elevator, and bad-mouthing a police officer 
  all result in a fine and a beating. Counterfeiting results in a 
  $10,000 fine and five beatings.

  A beating is an organized affair, in which an appointment is 
  made for the sentenced offender to appear at an office, rather 
  like a visit to the dentist. Appointments are rarely missed, due 
  to the ten- fold nature of escalating punishments. Paperwork is 
  required to officiate the event, "Please sign here and here in 
  triplicate...and here..." Awaiting the soon-to-be-reformed 
  criminal are two police officers and a government doctor in an 
  examination room, completely bare of furniture except for a 
  small stainless steel table on which sits a clipboard and a 
  medical bag. The penitent citizen is checked for sobriety, 
  directed to strip down to his/her underwear, and advised to 
  assume a stance of attention in the center of the room.

  The two officers proceed to administer the beating, which I will 
  describe sparingly, using no scathing adjectives or graphic 
  similies.

  Using weathered bamboo canes three feet long, both officers 
  brutally deliver slicing blows from far overhead, like 
  lumberjacks chopping wood. The hapless recipient generally falls 
  quickly to the linoleum floor, but the beating continues 
  relentlessly. The two officers trade blows like Chinese slaves 
  building an American railroad. Each blow raises a discoloring 
  welt or breaks the skin, and crimson tears flow from the shallow 
  wounds. The antidoctor, assigned to prevent death from excessive 
  abuse, determines the merciful end of the beating when the 
  victim is suitably reprimanded. After a few minutes, most 
  citizens walk out under their own power.

  If the criminal has been sentenced to more than one beating, an 
  interval of time is prescribed between beatings for the wounds 
  to heal. Some persons convicted of multiple crimes are suffered 
  to endure the lesser punishments, i.e. beatings, before the 
  ultimate penalty, namely, hanging to death. Smugglers, pushers, 
  and users are all sentenced to death, as are all perpetrators of 
  violent crimes. Participants in shootouts with police are never 
  tried -- anyone stupid enough to point a gun at a cop is 
  immediately shot to death.

  Allow me to state the obvious: cops in Newtopia engender no 
  small amount of respect. All males are required to serve a 
  two-year term in the service of their country when they are 18. 
  It's no wonder most elect to become police officers. What comes 
  around, goes around.

  Subversive behavior is not tolerated. Dissenting opinion and 
  left- wing blasphemy are not tolerated. Anyone caught voicing 
  such revolutionary rhetoric disappears. "The Government is 
  all-powerful, my son, and Thou Shalt Not Mess Wid It."

  All news of any kind, that is, newspapers and TV news, is 
  carefully censored by the state. Editorials do not exist. 
  Late-night TV stations run the following spots: A figure in 
  silhouette is shown standing, noose around neck. Next to the 
  figure is displayed a name and a crime. Trapdoor opens, figure 
  falls against taut rope, struggles for a moment, then swings 
  silently.

  McDonald's sprouts everywhere like a shit-eating fungus. The 
  thought of a Big Mac turns my guts, but the food park in the 
  broad alley attracts me like a dump attracts seagulls -- a 
  pungent smell on the air miles away. Ramshackle shops offer 
  steamed rice, noodles, and a variety of animal parts. The flat 
  eyes of whole, dead fish flick towards me in my peripheral 
  vision, but stay put when I stare at them. I order noodles and 
  fish by pointing and begin to eat.

  The sounds of commerce break apart like someone singing through 
  the blades of a moving fan. Thin yellow and orange spots 
  blinking little neon lamps. Throbbing stroboscopic flash scene. 
  My camera works at twelve frames per second. Now, only four 
  frames every second. Step forward. Flash. Fumble bowl. Flash. 
  Bowl crashes to street, chopsticks chasing madly after. Flash. 
  Next step forward lands on noodles. Flash. I'm somehow happy to 
  be earthward bound as my feet then my legs become egg noodle.

  Three Russians with five cars full of TVs, radios, VCRs, furs, 
  blank tapes, and pornography search docks for a homeward-bound 
  ferry for hire.


  I wake up in a hotel room with a bad hangover and a pulsing ache 
  in my side. I discover a wound there carefully sewn with black 
  thread -- twenty-three stitches. Here's the routine: hooker 
  snares white- faced John dupe, fucks him in prearranged hotel 
  room. Antidoctor joins femme fatale after John gets all squashed 
  on dope from doctored booze. Antidoc, he remove excess baggage 
  from Johnny's inventory. Kidney and pancreas sell well on black 
  market. Antidoc, he patch John Boy up nice: "Get yer hands offa 
  me! I'm a wholesaler, not a murderer!"

  A smooth, circular pool set in the center of the room stirs 
  restlessly under my gaze. Glass water on top protects gossamer 
  cloud below. Iridescent cream color cloud swirls when disturbed, 
  flipping clear opals flashing green orange red blue sparks. 
  Swells and ripples of opal chips cascade away from droplets of 
  sweat falling off my nose.

  The opals fall crystalline, tinkling, echoing. More sounds come 
  from every corner. My mother calls my name clearly. A trumpet 
  plays a raceway overture. Bells and whistles are interrupted by 
  a radio news report. "Thirty-one degrees at twenty-three twenty. 
  Humidity a low 97. Rainfall totals two-point-seven 
  centimeters..." All these sounds from my memory coming clearly, 
  yet projected on an auditory movie screen. I summon more sounds 
  by name -- earthen blocks thudding together, rusty old roller 
  skate wheels spinning, clips from a million unrecorded 
  symphonies composed in my head. Each sound is as clear and 
  unprocessed as spring water, and on tap for instant playback in 
  this auditory theater.


  "I'll be damned if it doesn't look like a free-flowing parking 
  garage," Zan confides.

  Allow me to describe this amazing structure. Each level 
  undulates like a sine wave, exactly one cycle from east to west 
  extremes of the building. A second wave, exactly out of phase 
  with the other, sits adjacent to the first, so that the two 
  waves share a common point exactly in the center of the entire 
  structure. By traversing from one wave to the next via one of 
  the aforementioned nodes, the intrepid parking garage spelunker 
  can achieve the uppermost bounds of this Sinusoidal Time Antenna 
  (STA).

  Each wave segment is frozen in time -- anchored in the stream, 
  if you will. Time is frozen, and we move freely through it. An 
  artificial light source provides the illumination here. Photons 
  cannot travel in the STA, so imaginary light is used. Each 
  quadrant of each wave bears an identifying scheme of colors, 
  applied to the white enamel supports. You cannot get lost; out 
  is always down, and up is always out.

  We arrive at the focus of the STA on the top level. The red and 
  green markers on the top floor create turbulence at the antinode 
  where we stand. We are looking for the boat with a hand-held EPD 
  scanner. Newtopia stretches out before us, playing at 
  three-quarter speed.

  "I think I've got it pegged in this frame, but it's bein' 
  bitchy," glowers Mike, his eyes searching the harbor below, 
  ninety berths wide.

  "Play it again, and I'll watch the right half."

  The night colors bleed into each other as Mike subtly shifts his 
  weight and posture. Then the waterfront resolves itself and 
  resumes three-quarter action.

  "I think... by the Hilton," I say, holding the scanner at arm's 
  length. A pale, blue-white globe winks furtively from the 
  river's shore -- it could be the moonlight. No, it's growing 
  brighter as the scanner pulls it in.

  "Aahhh yyyesssss," soothes Mike, exing his map, "Mister Tung."

  We exit the parking garage on foot, as we entered, at two twenty 
  in the morning, Newtime.


  The docks are cool and quiet. My sweat evaporates in the breeze, 
  leaving my skin sticky. We stand staring at the fishing boat in 
  berth 32. The rickety vessel bobs gently, partially revealing a 
  magic word just under the waterline, written in green slime. A 
  weathered brown hand pulls the cabin's curtain aside 
  soundlessly, fingernails yellow and cracked at the edges. Long 
  white threads grow erratically from Mr. Tung's chin. A small 
  blue bow tidies the braided whiskers. The rest of the man's body 
  and face, save the unmistakably Asian eyes, is that of a swarthy 
  forty-year-old, utterly covered in tattoos. A fat drop of rain 
  glances off my cheek, startling me. Mr. Tung disappears and we 
  step aboard.

  "They suggested I direct my question to you."

  Inside the tiny cabin, the walls are unexpectedly bare. A bunk 
  and a wooden desk are lit by a small incandescent bulb in the 
  ceiling. Mike nearly crawls in after me, and sits on the bed 
  rather than standing with his neck crooked. Mr. Tung sits on a 
  crate at the desk and motions, "Sit on the bed," clearly. My 
  eyes follow his pictorial arm as it swings by, leaving a trail 
  of runes like an Egyptian cartouche. Rain drums on the roof 
  rhythmically.

  Tung addresses his desk, "Everyone gets to ask a question. 
  Everyone gets to ask one question. You have never asked a 
  question."

  "No..." I blither uselessly.

  "Ask."

  "I... I don't know the words."

  "Ahhhh," Tung's eyes swing to mine. "You do have a question!"

  "I... don't..."

  "You don't have to tell me any words." His face calms.

  "I don't?"

  Tung just stares at me. My brain goes nowhere, stupidly echoing, 
  "I don't?" over and over. The air in the room begins to vibrate 
  with the rain drops hitting the ceiling like a thousand tiny 
  cops beating winos.

  "Okay, then try to tell me your question in words," Tung says, 
  shifting in his seat so his knees point at mine.

  "There's-- something --" Something making it hard for me to 
  think -- a horrible buzzing vibration in the air. Acid electric 
  taste of ground aluminum in the back of my head. Pale blue-white 
  light sucks the red from the walls, leaving a thin black-light 
  sheen. Mike is asleep on the bunk behind me. The boat begins to 
  pitch on the rising ocean water.

  "Don't fear! Tell me!" Tung grabs my shoulders. I can see his 
  bright eyes peering through an increasingly opaque neon cloud 
  around me. The rocking cabin makes me queasy, and I want to go 
  to sleep.

  Tung notices my fluttering eyes and shakes me. "Don't sleep. Pay 
  attention."

  The storm drones loudly, evenly, monotonously. The room 
  continues fading, except for Tung's clear eyes, like the 
  Cheshire Cat. These eyes, animated with concern, appear warm 
  against an increasingly freezing background.

  "You see!" Tung shakes me gently. "Tell me!"

  "There's-- Your eyes-- "

  "Yes!"

  "They're-- " The room swims. I grip the edge of the bunk for 
  dear life. I must focus! His eyes are--

  "Red!" I shout.

  "Yessssssssss," Tung hisses, spinning around and jerking open 
  his desk drawer. His hand plunges in and removes two cylindrical 
  sticks and a black glass bottle. Turning back to face me, he 
  notices my pale, sweaty skin. "Quick, remove your shirt!"

  The effort pushes me over the edge, and as I fumble with my 
  shirt I wretch convulsively, hitting my forehead on the 
  wastebasket Tung holds in front of me. The room is again lit by 
  the weak ceiling bulb.

  "Lie down now." Tung helps me straighten out on my back next to 
  Mike, his usually awesome snoring dwarfed by the storm, and my 
  nausea passes.

  "You now know the answer to your question. I will write it for 
  you. You must never forget. Hold this."

  Tung places the black bottle in my hand and dips the pointed end 
  of one stick into the ink. Placing the heel of his hand on my 
  chest over my heart, he holds the stick poised, dripping indigo. 
  My eyes widen, and I imagine him tacking me to the bed like a 
  vampire.

  Instead, he taps the sharpened stick sharply with the other, 
  pricking my chest with the point. A brilliant flash of 
  blue-white lightening blinds me momentarily. Thunder cracks 
  clearly like a series of two-by-fours. Now I get the point. He's 
  tattooing me! Small beads of crimson blood rise through the 
  black ink, warm and red like the deepest sunset.

  "Red!" Tung sings, and he is finished.

  We are ushered out to the dock so fast I hardly remember moving. 
  My shirt in my hand, I can see the rune on my chest, wet and 
  shining black in the moonlight.

  Tung stands in the doorway of the cabin, as if waiting for me to 
  meet his eyes. "_Aka_. It means 'red' in Japanese," he says, 
  disappearing into the cabin.

  "You got the answer?" asks Mike, still groggy and blinking.

  "I'm sure I did," I say. "But I'm not sure I understand it 
  completely."


  Aaron Lyon  (alyon@netcom.com)
--------------------------------

  Aaron Lyon is a 26-year-old graphic designer who will finish his 
  B.A. in art from San Jose State University this December. Aaron 
  is dangerously addicted to music, and is a guitarist, vocalist, 
  writer, husband and father-to-be. He would like to thank all 
  those whose experiences he has abused, and acknowledge William 
  H. Burroughs for his influence. _Newtopia_ is an excerpt from 
  _Two Tone Tangle_, a fictional autobiography based on the life 
  of painter Hieronymus Bosch. While many passages contain real 
  names and events, it does not purport to be factual.


  Cube  by Patrick Hurh
=======================
...................................................................
  * Software makes a poor surrogate parent. And a sibling who buys 
  that software? Almost as bad. *
...................................................................

  By the time they got back to the apartment block it was dark.

  Horza slouched against the wall of the elevator while Dorcas ran 
  his tape through the slit of the control panel. With an audible 
  click, a button halfway up the panel lit up. The number on its 
  surface was unreadable. The elevator car jerked upwards and 
  began its ascent.

  Dorcas turned and looked at his brother. Horza's haggard face 
  was pointed at the floor, his eyes glazed over. His hands went 
  through the pockets of his oversize trench coat and paused as 
  his right hand dipped into the left waistpocket. It reappeared 
  with a long, thin blank piece of paper. Horza stretched it out 
  in front of him, looking at the entire length.

  "Damn."

  "There's something left on the other side..." Dorcas didn't 
  finish as Horza flipped the paper over with a snap and located a 
  single blue derm. He peeled it off, looked at Dorcas and made an 
  offering gesture to his younger brother.

  "No thanks, man."

  Horza carefully rubbed the decal along his jugular.

  "You know, you should have taken that before the funeral. Maybe 
  you would have stayed awake."

  "I was stricken with grief," Horza intoned without emotion.

  "Well, I wasn't. Still ain't stricken either."

  As if on cue, the elevator gave an unusual sigh and rumbled into 
  silence.

  "What the fuck?" Horza growled. His eyes were wide and his face 
  flushed; the derm was taking effect.

  "Elevator stopped," Dorcas answered.

  "No shit, bro. Run your tape through again."

  The fluorolamps overhead flickered and then faded to about a 
  quarter of their earlier brightness. Dorcas looked at Horza. "It 
  won't work without any power."

  "Just try it."

  "_You_ try it!" Dorcas flung his card at Horza.

  Horza groped in the dim lighting. He found the card and swiped 
  it through the reader.

  Nothing.

  He tried again with the same effect.

  "Give it back, Horza. It's just a brownout. Be thankful we're 
  not at the bottom of the shaft by now."

  Horza tried the tape twice more and then lifted the card to 
  inspect it more closely. "This thing's all beat up, man -- you 
  gotta take care of your shit, Dor. It's like you don't care 
  where you live no more."

  "My card ain't the problem. There's a power brown and the lift 
  won't move 'til there's juice to lift it."

  "Well, what are we supposed to do, just sit here?" Horza tried 
  the card again. Nothing.

  "Give me my tape back."

  "Maybe I should hang on to it 'til you learn some more 
  responsibility. Or maybe I'll set a curfew lock on it, now that 
  I'm your guardian."

  "Yeah? And who'd show you how to run the fuckin' credit tape, or 
  the automatons, or your fuckin' g-friend's chastity belt?"

  "Or the fuckin' elevator!" Horza bellowed and held the card out 
  to Dorcas -- and snatched it back as Dorcas reached for it. He 
  held it, taunting, two feet over Dor's head.

  Dorcas rolled his eyes. "I'm tellin' ya, my tape had nothing to 
  do with this shit!" He jumped for the card and, in the process, 
  jammed the top of his head into Horza's nose. Horza groaned and 
  fell to the floor, still clutching the tape card in his upraised 
  hand.

  Dorcas rubbed the top of his head and lunged again for the tape. 
  He reached Horza's lifted wrist and grabbed it as Horza 
  scrambled backward, pushing with his legs. Dor crawled on top of 
  Horza and twisted the card away. He stuffed it in his pants 
  pocket and backed off to the other side of the elevator.

  Suddenly Horza leapt to his feet and charged. Dorcas yelped and 
  defensively surrounded his face with his arms, elbows pointed at 
  his older brother.

  No blow came. Instead, Dorcas heard Horza kick the elevator 
  doors. Once hard, then again more softly.

  "Fuckin' thing."

  Dorcas lowered himself to sit on the floor, knees raised before 
  him, and stared at the opposite wall. Horza continued to tap his 
  foot against the sealed doors and dab at his nose with the 
  sleeve from his overcoat.

  Silence attempted to fill the confined space, thwarted only by 
  Horza's sporadic pacing. Only a few minutes had passed, yet 
  Horza acted as if he'd been preparing to say something for a 
  couple of hours.

  "You know the small inheritance we got now?"

  "Yeah."

  "I spent it on the funeral."

  Silence filled the elevator again.

  "What do you mean you spent it on the funeral?" Dorcas had 
  thought that the cremation was part of the insurance settlement. 
  "It's not like we came away with anything from all this." The 
  thing that had kept him going throughout the day was knowing he 
  could spend his share of the money on a cheap deck... maybe 
  start doing something he liked for a change.

  Horza read the disappointment in his brother's voice. He 
  nervously fingered a lighter in his pocket and struggled with 
  his next sentence. "I... I'm sorry about Mom and I know you had 
  plans for the money. So did I. But I wanted to do what was 
  right. The man in the parlor said it would be like still having 
  Mom around. And I didn't know what... what I could do. I don't 
  know how to be a guardian. Your guardian." Horza anxiously 
  pulled a cubic package from the folds of his coat.

  Dorcas looked at it and then at Horza's face. He couldn't see 
  his eyes in the dim elevator light. "Horza, you didn't... a ROM 
  cube? Come on, that costs a fortune. Can't you take it back?"

  "Dor, this is what's best for us, man. I don't know how to be a 
  mother. I can't be a mother. I got my whole life ahead of me. 
  I've... spoken to it, I mean her, and it's totally like she's 
  right there! Take a look at it at least. You're too young to 
  have a mother like me." As if in emphasis, Horza tossed the cube 
  in Dorcas's lap and turned to hit the door again, this time with 
  open palms.

  Dorcas looked at the wrapped cube. He saw the elevator's dim 
  fluorolamps reflected in the shrink-wrap. Along one of the 
  square, five-inch-long sides was printed Mom's name with a poem 
  below it in smaller lettering. Dorcas couldn't read the poem in 
  the light.

  He looked at Horza, who now seemed more interested in another 
  scrap of paper he had fished from his pockets. He looked back 
  down at the cube. He hadn't even touched it yet, but it seemed 
  foreign in his lap and he could feel the coldness of it through 
  his jeans. Horza may not feel like a mother, Dorcas thought, but 
  he sure was a mother fucker. This thing in his lap cost not only 
  his inheritance but probably half their rent for the next five 
  years. Because of this thing in his lap, he'd have to find a job 
  because Horza sure as hell won't.

  Dorcas held up the cube with both hands and tried to read the 
  poem. Only it wasn't a poem. More like instructions, English 
  instructions, badly translated from Japanese. He scraped at the 
  shrink wrapping with his middle finger until a nick in his 
  fingernail scratched it open. The plastic unraveled. He flipped 
  the cube over, staring at its blank surfaces. In the dimness, 
  Dorcas could just make out the glimmer of a display beneath the 
  glossy sides.

  "The switch is hidden on the bottom," Horza said.

  "Yeah, I see it." Dorcas jumped at Horza's words and felt 
  embarrassed to realize that Horza, although trying to appear 
  uninterested, was watching Dorcas fumble with the cube.

  Horza turned back to the elevator control console and began to 
  inspect the useless buttons. He traced his fingers around them 
  and was genuinely surprised when they depressed with his touch. 
  He never knew that they were actually buttons. He began to push 
  all the buttons rapidly. "Damn fucking thing."


  Dorcas did his best to ignore Horza as the cube turned on. All 
  six of its sides came to life with a quick flash followed by a 
  lasting greenish glow that emanated from the six surfaces. He 
  turned his back on the rest of the elevator and leaned against 
  one wall, facing into a corner. His short legs were doubled up 
  with his toes pressed up against the floor molding.

  He flipped the cube so one side was facing up at his eyes. His 
  mother, with a blank stare on her face, peered back at him. Her 
  brown hair hung in lanky rivulets from the top of her head. 
  Wrinkles surrounded her smile as she seemed to recognize him.

  "Dorcas! It's about time someone picked up the phone. I've been 
  sitting in this room forever."

  Dorcas flipped the cube so another side faced him. This time his 
  mother looked up at him with a younger face. Scorn was evidenced 
  by her frown and furrowed brow.

  "Dorcas... You stay here and talk to me before I page your 
  father at work. If you run off again I'll -- "

  He flipped the cube again. This time he saw a young woman with 
  her hair bobbed short and a silver-polychromatic film blouse 
  peeking up from the bottom edge of the cube.

  "Son? Is that you?"

  Dorcas frowned and looked up at Horza, who still seemed 
  entranced with the spent piece of derm paper. "Yeah, Mom. It's 
  me."

  "You look so old..."

  "Well you shoulda seen yourself today, Ma. You didn't look so 
  hot in that jar."

  "Jar?"

  Dorcas flipped the cube again and saw his mother as he had last 
  seen her, eyes sunken and surrounded by bright blue eyeliner, 
  skin baked into an orange glow. He stared at the image. She 
  didn't stare back. Her eyes seemed glazed over and focused on 
  something beyond the screen of the cube.

  "Mom?" Dorcas said softly. He looked up at Horza. He was pushing 
  buttons again.

  "Mom?! Can't you hear me?"

  Recognition wandered its way across his mother's face. "Dor? Is 
  that you? What are you doing in my simstim? I thought you were 
  at school today."

  "Mom, I went to your funeral today. It was kinda rainy out and 
  the pastor said we'd all be better off underground."

  "What? I can't hear you! Listen, can you come back in a few 
  minutes? We'll talk then. We'll have a good talk."

  "Mom, you lost it, didn't you?"

  "I'll talk to you later, son. This is important."

  "You lost your _life._"

  Dorcas flipped back to the first face he had seen. He had about 
  three seconds before it became animated. He looked at the 
  sadness ingrained in the face floating in the cube and realized 
  that some of the lines he saw there he had helped place and 
  still others he had erased.

  "Dor? Stay here a minute. I'm kind of confused. Did the simstim 
  just end? I thought I was in the middle of... Something must 
  have gone wrong. Why are you calling me from school?" The 
  puzzled look on her face stirred guilt in Dorcas, rooted in his 
  self-indulgent thoughts at the funeral.

  "Dorcas? Are you in trouble again? Look, I know it's not your 
  favorite school, but it really is for the best. We can't afford 
  to send you to the public school. At least this way you can 
  please your father by paying for school as you go. And you're 
  learning good responsibility too. Just think what your father 
  would say if he caught you in your brother's footsteps. He's got 
  enough problems with the Feds as it is. Anyway I'll be home in a 
  few hours and we can do a networked simstim together, if you're 
  up for it. Your teacher said that the new Alamo series was 
  pretty good. I'll let you be Davy Crockett. What do you say?"

  "Sounds great, Mom." Dorcas flipped the cube again.

  Her face filled the side of the cube. The edges could hardly 
  contain the smile she grinned at him.

  "Kimopolous, Dorcas," she beamed.

  "Mom?"

  "Yes, sort of." His mother's face pulled away from the screen. 
  Dorcas saw bright orange skin, without a trace of an errant open 
  pore, recede from his magnified gaze. The face was surrounded by 
  curly, shiny dark hair and accented with sharply angled red 
  lipstick. The eyes shining at him blinked in slow motion as the 
  glare from the cube flickered and her silver blouse rose into 
  view. "Although I don't have the memory access that is stored in 
  the other cube faces, I do operate on the same simplistic neural 
  network that was modeled after the sample from your mother's 
  last simstim log. And although I don't have access to most of 
  her memories, this cube face... Me, I have a lot of room for 
  memory storage. I will be the one who, over the coming years of 
  comfort and enjoyment, will be able to interact with you on a 
  moment to moment basis. At least that's what the brochure says."

  "You mean you'll be my mother?" Dorcas looked over at Horza 
  slumped against the opposite wall. He looked like he was asleep, 
  but Dorcas couldn't be sure. The small scrap of derm he had 
  applied probably wasn't enough to keep him riding high for more 
  than a few minutes.

  "I'll be more of a mother than he will," replied the cube.

  Dorcas looked back at the thing in his hands. The animated face 
  was straining to look beyond the edge of its box. She turned her 
  gaze back to Dorcas.

  "Is that your brother?" The cube clicked for a moment. "Horza?"

  "Yeah, that's him. Don't you even know what he looks like?"

  "I told you my memories of your mother's past are minimal. I'm 
  basically the amalgam of your mother's neural pathways."

  "My mother never used words like that."

  "Well, maybe there's an improvement."

  Dorcas fingered the edges of the cube. The thing didn't really 
  act like his mom. He tried to think of something to piss it off.

  "What's on your mind, Dorcas?"

  "Fuck you, you fuckin' machine."

  The screen flickered quickly.

  "Ooh boy, that really hurts me, dumb fuck." The computer 
  generated image widened her eyes and pursed her lips in mock 
  surprise then flicked back to its earlier appearance. "Listen 
  Dorcas, I may not know much about you or our life together 
  before, but I do think like your mom. And right now you're 
  getting on my tits. Why don't you try and care about something? 
  Doesn't it matter that I'm dead?"

  "What matters is that you -- this clicking box in my lap -- took 
  away the only damn thing I could have enjoyed from my Mom dyin'! 
  And, yeah you're dead, but you never were alive!"

  "Well pardon me for being an expensive fuckin' machine! I've got 
  feelings too. It takes a hard personality to deal with the likes 
  of you... son."

  "I don't need to be dealt with!"

  "Well, what do you need?"

  Dorcas stared at the cube. "Not what you've got."

  "Now you listen here, young man," the face retorted. "I've got 
  more going for me than you think. If you think I'm going to take 
  that kind of back talk from you, I'll..."

  "You'll what, Mom?" It rolled off Dor's tongue with a smile. 
  "Scream at me 'til your batteries run out?"

  Dorcas flipped the cube quickly before she could respond.


  Dorcas rotated the cube until he found the youngest face, the 
  face that he recognized as his mother but didn't remember from 
  his past. Before the face became animated he studied its bright 
  cheerful glow. His mother looked about twenty-five or younger, 
  and very excited.

  "Dorcas? Is that you?" Her surprise at seeing him seemed as 
  genuine as before. "You look so old."

  "Yeah, its me."

  "This is so cool. How old are you? Thirteen? Fourteen?"

  "Twelve."

  "Wow, you look even older than that."

  "Thanks, I guess." Dorcas tried to think of something to say. 
  "Uhh... how old am I where, uh, you are?"

  His young mother seemed preoccupied with looking at him. Her 
  gaze was so excited and intense it made Dorcas nervous. She 
  blinked and piped up suddenly, "Hey, do you have a girlfriend 
  yet?" She gave him a sly smile. "I bet you do."

  "Mom," Dorcas pronounced the word as two whiny syllables. "Where 
  are you? Where am I in that thing?" He gestured into the screen.

  "Isn't it great?" His mother turned to motion at the space 
  behind her. "All this stuff... and it really isn't real!" Dorcas 
  couldn't see anything but a white haze where she was gesturing.

  She continued talking excitedly, "Uncle George gave me one of 
  those simstim upgrades for my birthday! Now I don't have to just 
  sit there and watch, I can interact 'cause they got my brain 
  code or something in the stim machine! Isn't it so cool?"

  "It's okay, Mom. But you use the thing a lot."

  "What? No, I just got this stuff. It just came today. Uncle 
  George says you're just a construct of what you'd look like in a 
  few years. Wow! Twelve years old, huh?"

  "Mom..." She didn't hear him because she had turned and seemed 
  to be talking to someone else. Should he tell her that she that 
  was the construct?

  "Mom?" Now she was twirling around in the white mist, her silver 
  pantaloons whipping around her legs. "Mom!"

  She stopped twirling and looked at him. She looked faintly 
  surprised. "Oh! I didn't know you were still there. You can go 
  now. I don't need you anymore."

  "Mom, you don't understand. You're the construct. You're the one 
  who is floating around in this box." He shook the box.

  She looked confused and then brightened perceptibly. "Ahh... No, 
  you're wrong, Dor. I just put you to bed fifteen minutes ago. 
  You were only eleven months old then and you'll be eleven months 
  old when I jack out."

  "Then jack out, Mom. I bet you can't, 'cause I've got the 
  controls on this side of the cube."

  His mother frowned and looked around her quickly. "Well, I hate 
  to jack out now, but I guess I can get back in right away. Uncle 
  George bought me a full year's subscription!"

  "Uncle George," Dorcas said under his breath, "can suck my 
  cock."

  His mother's face looked preoccupied for a few seconds and then 
  she was gone. The screen of the cube flickered from black to 
  static and then back to the mists of before.

  Superimposed over the mists was his mother's young face looking 
  surprised. "Dorcas, is that you?" She narrowed her brows. "You 
  look so old..."

  Dorcas flipped the cube...


  ...and found himself looking into the glassy stare of the oldest 
  construct. From the youngest to the oldest.

  Dorcas waited for the face to animate, then realized that the 
  face was animated except it didn't happen to be moving.

  "Mom!" The right corner of her mouth twitched. "Mom!" he yelled 
  again. It reminded him of the countless times he had roused her 
  from her dreaming before. This cube face at least seemed to 
  accurately mimic his mother.

  "Mother!" This time her eyes focused on his for a moment.

  "Dorcas?" she mumbled. "Not now, I'm in the middle of 
  something." She started to slip away again.

  "Mom?"

  "What?"

  Dorcas paused as he tried to think of something to say. "Can I 
  go out to play?"

  The orange face of his mother contemplated the question for all 
  of a second. "Okay," she said without emotion.


  Dorcas turned the cube over to the bottom face. Next to the 
  power switch was a recessed receptacle that held the small fuel 
  cell. Dorcas pried his fingers behind the cell and pulled.

  The cube flashed brightly from all of its sides and then dimmed 
  to a faint glow. Its afterimage radiance was just visible in the 
  darkened elevator.

  Dorcas stood with the cube in his left hand and the battery in 
  his right. He let the cube drop to the floor and pocketed the 
  battery. The cube bounced once and came to rest leaning against 
  the elevator wall.

  His brother was indeed asleep, hunched over in the corner. 
  Dorcas looked at the ceiling of the elevator and then back down 
  at his brother.

  "Nothing like a little cooperation," he whispered and then 
  stepped on the huddled form of Horza and launched himself at the 
  ceiling. His hands lifted the drop ceiling panels as he rose and 
  he grabbed onto the supporting cross members.

  "What the hell?" Horza cried as he awoke.

  Dorcas quickly pulled himself up into the overhead crawl space 
  and swung his legs out of the way of Horza's groping hands. Once 
  secured in his position, Dorcas found the emergency hatch handle 
  next to his head and pulled it open. Elevator tag had never come 
  in so handy.

  Horza yelled from below, "Where do you think you're going?"

  Dorcas clambered out onto the top of the elevator and smiled. 
  "Out to play." He slammed the hatch closed behind him.

  Inside the elevator, Horza spun around and spied the cube lying 
  against the wall. The afterimage glow had dwindled into small 
  white circular spots at the center of each cube face. He bent 
  down and picked it up. If he looked at the cube real close, he 
  imagined he could see the tiny image of his mother's face 
  peering out of each one of its shining white dots.


  Patrick Hurh (hurh@admail.fnal.gov)
-------------------------------------

  Patrick Hurh is a mechanical design engineer who designs 
  prototype high energy particle beam diagnostic devices for Fermi 
  National Accelerator Laboratory, located in Batavia, Illinois. 
  He writes science fiction in his spare time.


  Manna  by D.C. Bradley
========================
...................................................................
  * What is charity? Some would simply define it as "giving of 
  yourself." But that phrase has _lots_ of meanings... *
...................................................................

  I seen this show once about how them rich guys on A level live. 
  Most folks I know ain't never been higher than E. I guess I been 
  on D level once, but that don't count much since my leg was 
  busted and I couldn't hardly see with the pain and all. Harry 
  says he's got better upper class morals or something like that 
  than the rest of us, because his dad was raised on C level -- he 
  _says_. (I don't hardly believe half of what Harry says all the 
  time.) Roge says upper class shit don't mean nothing down here. 
  Roge sees things straight.

  Me and him are right-hand pals. We've known each other since 
  before Roge's ma got put in the freezer. That was on H level 
  where we was raised. We done most everything together and ain't 
  hardly ever had a fight.

  That's why we both joined the Anarchs. We didn't want to end up 
  getting froze 'cept maybe if we went together. I guess Roge gets 
  kind of scared some times about the freezer, after what they 
  done to his ma. That's the only time when he don't see so 
  straight.

  Today we went to the Anarchs meeting like we done every week 
  since we joined up. Merlin (he's the boss) calls us the faggot 
  twins, 'cause neither of us never goes nowhere without the 
  other. I think he's joking, since Roge is blacker'n lights-out 
  and I'm white as junkies' pus. Maybe I got a little black in me 
  but it don't show. I can't hardly tell most times when Merlin is 
  joking. He's got that scar down the side of his face and around 
  his eye. Half his mouth don't never smile and the other half 
  only does when he's mad.

  "So, what you cookin' for us today, Boss?" That's Harry. He 
  can't keep his mouth shut more'n five minutes. Roge says Harry 
  is all con. He ain't told the truth yet since he was plopped out 
  on the floor from his poor old ma. "Any revolutions brewing? No, 
  then how about we just go raid the junkie shop down the rail 
  shaft? That's a good old standby."

  "Shut your stinking hole, Harry," Roge says. "We want any shit 
  from you, we can unplug your fucking skull and let it drain into 
  the rotting piss gutter."

  "Amazing," Harry gibes. "A muscle head gets a few neurons and 
  there's no telling what he'll do next. If I didn't hear a 
  complete sentence coming out of this ape I'd have said it was 
  junkieshit -- "

  "Cut out the crap, you two." Merlin isn't smiling, but he's just 
  a little pissed off. He stands up at the end of the table. "You 
  morons were supposed to be scouting level K this past week. I 
  want reports from each of you." We all look down at the table. I 
  trace somebody's name that was carved in it with a knife.

  "Halverson, you've been real quiet over there. Would you care to 
  give that rusty trap of yours a couple flaps?" Hal is big and he 
  don't have much to say most of the time. He doesn't look at us, 
  but keeps staring at the table.

  "Block one, there ain't much there -- same with two and three. 
  Four got burnt, so there's some loot'n there, but most of it's 
  already been done." He closes his big jaw, so we all know he's 
  said his fill and don't bother him for more.

  "Anybody check out five or six?" Merlin asks. He knows Sam's the 
  one that done it, but he never talks straight to Sam.

  She don't talk to him neither but scuffs with her foot in the 
  dust and says in her husky voice, "Passed through Block two on 
  the way. Kid I talked to says they got a remote hookup to the 
  Network restricted channels. Says it came from -- "

  "I want to hear about five and six, not the goddamn sight seeing 
  tour on the way there." Merlin turns and talks to the gutted 
  wall. "Halverson's done block two anyway. If he says there's 
  nothing worth pick'n, then we ain't gonna bother to try."

  Sam kicks harder with her foot, but stays cool. "Six's got a 
  couple junkie shops -- that's it. Five was getting fumigated. 
  Maybe we could get in. I don't know."

  "How 'bout the twins?" Merlin says as if he hadn't even heard 
  Sam. "Did you clowns take a stroll through seven to ten?" Roge 
  and I look at each other in that crap-in-the-pants surprised 
  way. I should've known we had more than two blocks. We only done 
  seven and eight.

  Roge jumps in real quick. "Seven's got a back-room pawn shop. 
  Alex and me seen some of their stuff. A few power packs, and a 
  stash of them old police slugs was the best of the lot. They had 
  a couple muscles to protect the place, but no arms we could see. 
  Eight was a dud, and hell, so were nine and ten."

  I can feel Merlin's eyes burning holes in my head. I'm thinking 
  real fast and just sort of blurt out, "Nine's got that Magic 
  Man." I never was a fast thinker. Why the hell did I have to 
  open my big mouth?

  "What kind of junkie pus are you trying to feed us, Alex?" Sam 
  gets on my case, 'cause she's still sore about Merlin cuttin' 
  into her.

  "N -- nothing. I'm just stupid I guess." I wish they would leave 
  me be, but Merlin leans towards me with his red scar all puffed 
  out.

  "Tell us about the Magic Man, Alex." He talks real sweet and 
  makes me nervous all over.

  "Lady says he, uh, he can do magic stuff." They're all staring 
  at me. "I mean, he takes care of poor folk and -- " Merlin's 
  scar is getting redder and redder. "She says so -- lots of 'em 
  seen it, late at night." I'm surprised, because Harry comes to 
  my rescue and saves me from getting my ass kicked.

  "Ass for brains has it all screwed up as usual, but if you would 
  allow me to interpret you'll see he ain't junkieshitting." Harry 
  makes a big show of fixin' his chair just right before he 
  begins. "This guy showed up a couple of weeks back. No one knew 
  him from the next psychotic pus head, but he hides out on the K 
  level like he was born there or something. He's got some kind of 
  gizmo that he brings out at night. Like this dung head was 
  saying, the piss-poor sods from all over K crawl over to Block 
  Nine to get food and medicine -- at least that's what they say 
  they got."

  "What's the machine look like?" Merlin's eyes are like slits. I 
  shiver just looking at him.

  "They didn't say much that made sense. Old man told me the Magic 
  Man puts dead cats and rats and stuff in there and it comes out 
  like bread. He showed me some."

  Merlin whirls around and starts pacing up and down, kicking the 
  trash all over the place. The scar seems like it's crawling all 
  over his face and might jump right off. Finally he comes back to 
  the table. "We're gonna get it," he says real cool.

  "What is it?" Roge asks.

  "What you need to know for, muscle head?" But he goes on anyway. 
  "It's a food distiller. High-tech shit they was working on in 
  the military when I -- " He stops suddenly and his eyes turn 
  mean. "Hell, I ain't gonna sit here all night explaining to a 
  couple of faggot twins. Go get some beauty sleep for your fat 
  asses, 'cause we got work to do -- tonight."

  Roge and me leave the Anarchs' den and just walk around for a 
  while. We go to our favorite hangout down by the busted water 
  main. When we was kids it tore open between H and I levels and 
  filled up somebody's basement before it stopped. No one never 
  saw so much water . It ain't near as high now. We like to throw 
  scraps in and watch 'em sink through the green gunk on top.

  I ask Roge what he thinks about the Magic Man. He says he's 
  never seen no magic before that wasn't faked somehow. "But 
  what's the difference?" he says, and I just know he's right. 
  Roge sees things straight. We sit for a while, and then I speak 
  up again. What about them poor folks? I ask. They can't hardly 
  get enough to eat down there on level K, and we're gonna take 
  away the food whatchamacallit. It sort of bothers me down in my 
  gut. Merlin always said I was a softie. Roge don't say much for 
  a while. "It ain't right to steal from poor folks," he finally 
  says. He don't like it neither. "Most everyone's poor sometime 
  or other and no one likes it any better'n the next guy."

  We sit for a while longer, throwing junk into the slimy water. 
  Sometimes bubbles come up from where the trash sank. I can't 
  hardly describe it, but the way them bubbles rise up so happy 
  like and then get all weighed down by the mush and burst. It 
  makes me sad sometimes. I guess Merlin is right; I am a softie.

  Me and Roge stand up after a long time. We walk back to our room 
  and choke down a few food pills. They don't taste like much, but 
  there ain't anything else around to eat. "What do you think 
  Merlin's gonna do with the food gizmo?" I ask Roge. He don't 
  know.

  "Maybe he'll sell it, or maybe we'll have to catch cats and 
  stuff so we can eat out of it." That's all Roge can think of. I 
  can't figure nothing better than Roge.

  We lie around on the floor and try to find something on the 
  Network screen. They got lots of shows about how to live the 
  right way, so you don't get hauled off to the freezer. Seems 
  like there are more of them now then there used to be. It don't 
  do no good, though, 'cause just as many people get froze as 
  before. I wonder if them folks on A level watch these shows. 
  Roge says the uppers don't go to the freezer, so they don't 
  gotta learn to live right. He's probably seein' it straight like 
  usual.

  When it says it's time for lights-out on the Network, we go back 
  to the Anarch's den. The hallways are only half lit. We have to 
  walk real quiet so no one don't jump out and mug us. Most times, 
  mugs don't go after big guys like us out of respect, but this is 
  I level, where you can't trust no one.

  We get to the den all right. The other Anarchs are there except 
  Sam, but she comes in after us.

  "Break the shock bars out, you muscle heads, and stop slouchin' 
  around like a bunch of freezer burns." We do what Merlin tells 
  us. Roge kisses his stick and slaps it against his leg.

  "Ole Stinger," he says. I use to call mine Tickle, but it 
  busted. Harry says I always bust things since I'm so dumb, but I 
  always took care of Tickle. Anyway, now I got an old one that 
  ain't so good anymore.

  "Dammit, who's got my glow hat?" Sam growls. She looks all 
  around and then at me. "You got my hat again?" I shake my head, 
  but she comes over and looks at mine. "Alex, what kind of pus 
  you got for brains? It don't even fit on your big greaseball 
  head. You got mine."

  Roge cracks a big smile. "I think she likes ya, Alex." I just 
  spit on the floor and go find my glow hat. I can't never get 
  them damn hats straight.

  "We're going soon as you fag twins get your butts off the 
  burner." Merlin sounds real edgy tonight. We grab our stuff and 
  head for the rail shaft. The lifts don't work at night and you 
  got to have a special pass for each level anyway.

  The shaft ain't got no lightin' so we switch our glow hats on. 
  Them junkies got a shop a little ways in, but they don't give us 
  no hassle tonight. We just walk on by till we get to the duct. 
  The duct is this big hole in the floor with a ladder stickin' 
  out. We climb down. Hal goes first, since he's so big, to scare 
  any mugs away.

  While I climb down, this question keeps saying itself in my head 
  until I finally can't hold it in and ask it out loud. "How we 
  gonna get that food whatchamathinger back up to the den? Maybe 
  it's real big."

  "How do we always get our loot back up?" Harry says right below 
  me. "You muscle heads lug it back up. We got ropes and all the 
  other shit you big bastards need. Just leave the thinks to us 
  and everything will be slick as junkiepiss." I look down and 
  step on his fingers. He cusses at me until Merlin tells him to 
  shut up.

  It's a long climb down to K. We have to take a couple side 
  tunnels and I'm glad Merlin's with us, 'cause I'd get lost in 
  the dark like this. Finally Hal stops up ahead and says we got 
  down to K all right. There ain't nobody around that I can see. 
  That's good, 'cause some of 'em down here've got that rash from 
  the fumigation. You can catch it from 'em if you ain't lucky.

  Merlin says we're in Block Two. That means we got to walk all 
  the way to Nine, so we get moving. Some of the hallways down 
  here ain't even lit at all. My ma told me once about how this 
  used to be A level. There weren't no others above it. I figure 
  that means the uppers used to live down here. That must have 
  been a long time ago. It's mostly gutted now.

  Finally we get to Nine and start lookin' around for the Magic 
  Man. It doesn't take long before we see a crowd of people ahead 
  in one of them empty lots. We sneak up in the dark hallway with 
  our glow hats turned off. I can see the food gizmo in the middle 
  of the room. People are lined up beside it. Some of 'em have 
  dead cats and sacks of trash just like Harry said.

  The Magic Man is standing there puttin' stuff in one side and 
  handin' out white chunks from the other. He ain't very tall or 
  tough lookin' and he don't have no weapon that I can see. He 
  just looks like the rest or them poor folks: sort of stooped 
  over and dressed in scraps of insulation that got ripped off the 
  walls a long time ago.

  Merlin pushes us forward and yells, "Don't nobody move and you 
  won't get hurt." We all run in shouting and waving our shock 
  bars like we're crazy. I want to stop and think, but there ain't 
  no time. Maybe if I wasn't so dumb, I could figure things 
  faster, but there just ain't enough time. The poor folks all 
  freeze and crouch on the ground like they probably done a 
  hundred times before. The Magic Man, he never even looks at us. 
  He just keeps putting dead cats and garbage into his food gizmo.

  Hall gets there first and his bar just nicks the Magic Man when 
  he swings it around. The little Man springs back from the shock. 
  I see his face then, except it's not a man it's a woman. She's 
  got this real sad look when she sees into my eyes, like she 
  wants to cry, but she doesn't. I'm moving forward real slow but 
  fast at the same time and I know I can't stop.

  She's real quick, which surprises me. One second she is standing 
  there lookin in my eyes; the next moment she's jumped up and 
  into the food gizmo where all the dead cats went. I holler real 
  loud and reach for her, but she's gone.

  Merlin yells at us to bring the gizmo to him, but I don't care 
  if he gets so mad he smiles till his face splits in two. I just 
  stand there and say real calm like, "What we gonna do, Roge?"

  He looks around at all them poor people and lowers Stinger. "We 
  gotta feed that Magic Man out to all these piss poor folks," he 
  says. I knew Roge would see things straight like he always done. 
  It's just what she would've wanted.

  And so that's what we done.


  D.C. Bradley (dbradley@hmc.edu)
---------------------------------
  
  D.C. Bradley is a sophomore physics major at Harvey Mudd College 
  in Claremont, California. He spends his time playing with neural 
  nets and cruising the Internet. He looks forward to spending 
  time with his family in Wisconsin.


  Sooner or Later  by Eric Skjei
================================
...................................................................
  * At some point, we all walk into and out of another's life: 
  sometimes with a ceremony, sometimes without even a nod. But 
  what defines our path: its beginning or its end? *
...................................................................

  First the tire blew out. Then his tongue began to bleed. It all 
  happened at the same time. He heard the muffled thump and the 
  clatter of the hubcap skipping away, felt the puff of air and 
  the new wobble, and became aware of that familiar salty-metallic 
  taste.

  "_Cafard_, as the French say." The renowned author was droning 
  away on the radio. "A sort of weariness of the spirit." The word 
  brought to mind the morning at the cafe when she first literally 
  let her hair down for him, transforming herself from contained 
  professor of romance languages into sexual creature, then 
  telling him about the dream she had had the night before about 
  his eyes. It was an invitation, and he had happily accepted it 
  for the next seven years.

  At the sound of the flat tire the two women in the van next to 
  him craned in a startled way. Their van slowed abruptly. He did 
  nothing, just kept driving, the seat gyrating beneath him. His 
  blessed mind chimed in. _Sure, why stop? It's pouring. You'll_
  _just get all wet._ In the rear view mirror, he could see the two 
  women peering at him incredulously as their van dropped behind 
  him. _Why bother? Who cares? You don't, that's obvious. So ruin_
  _your rims._

  He pushed his tongue against his teeth, exploring the sore, then 
  looked in the rear view mirror. There it was, a thin red 
  vertical crack at the very tip. _It's the dry weather. Your_ 
  _hands, lips, and even your heels for Christ's sake are always_ 
  _getting dry and cracked._

  He thought about his meeting that morning with Dr. K. Slowly 
  turning the pages of the wedding album, the doctor had listened 
  attentively to him. "A Buddhist wedding," repeated the doctor 
  tonelessly. An embryonic hope had started in his breast. Then 
  the doctor handed the thick volume back to him, saying, "So, why 
  are you showing me this?" Disappointment replaced the hope.
  _So don't go back._

  Now the album lay on the seat next to him, bouncing to the car's 
  awful thump. He thought back to the wedding, the golf jokes 
  beforehand, the ritualistic ceremony with the seven objects -- 
  what were they again? -- a conch shell, a flower, a flame, a 
  something, a something. Bowing to the Regent. Trying to put the 
  ring on her finger. That took some effort. The room was 
  sweltering and her finger was swollen. She still had the 
  designer dress, but never wore it.

  His own ring was in his desk drawer now, not on his finger. 
  _They weren't wedding rings anyway, they were engagement rings._ 
  Gold with a green jade crescent across the top.
  _Kind of like lime Life Savers._ From the jeweler at the foot of 
  Grant Street. Often admired, envied too, by all her friends and 
  sometimes also her lovers, even here in the Midwest, where it 
  still was _de rigueur_ to wear diamonds.

  He returned to the present. _You're going to ruin your rims._ 
  _You're getting careless._ He pondered that for a minute.
  _You could care less. C'mon, stop and change the damned tire._ 
  _You even have some of that canned stuff in the glove_
  _compartment. Remember? For flat tires. You bought it from those_
  _handicapped people who are always calling to sell you light_
  _bulbs. So they would leave you alone. Why not use that?_

  He sighed, aimed toward the shoulder and slowly bumped to a 
  halt. In the sudden silence, the car sat idling obediently, 
  waiting for his command, stupidly unaware of its predicament. 
  _Whither thou go, eh?_ Not anymore. _She's gone already, and I'm_
  _not going anywhere._ Austin. Heat and humidity. _I hope they're_
  _miserable._

  He turned the engine off and sat in the ruins of his life. Cars 
  whizzed wetly by. He reached down to the lever beside the seat 
  and let the back recline. If he could sleep, he thought, he 
  would. Then when it stopped raining, he would get out and change 
  the tire.

  He closed his eyes. In the silences between passing cars, he 
  could hear the loud ticking of the dashboard clock. After a 
  while, he sat up and examined the tip of his tongue again. There 
  it was, the same hairline crack. It had stopped bleeding, but it 
  still hurt.

  He turned on the radio and got a burst of static. Underneath the 
  noise, he could faintly hear the author going on in his plummy 
  voice, saying something about morality and _perestroika._ He 
  thought he heard a hard "t" in the word "often." 
  _Hypercorrection._ Quel bozo. _And his latest book isn't even_ 
  _that good._

  He turned the radio off. _That antenna needs work. Every time_
  _you go through the car wash, it wags back and forth like a_
  _semaphore. One of these days it's just going to snap right off._

  Headlights appeared in the mirror. They rapidly grew bigger and 
  brighter, then stopped right behind him, filling the interior of 
  the car with a harsh blazing glare. _No light bar silhouette, no_ 
  _flashing red and blue lights. Where are your insurance and_
  _registration? In the glove compartment?_ A horn honked. He sat, 
  unmoving. It honked again. He grunted, opened the door and 
  stepped out into the rain.

  It was the van with the two women, the one that had been in the 
  lane next to him when the tire blew out. He bent down next to 
  the driver's door. She cracked her window and rolled it down an 
  inch.

  "We thought you might want us to call a tow truck," she shouted. 
  "We almost didn't come back, but then we thought we should. 
  Nobody helps anybody these days." He was getting drenched and it 
  looked like she would just keep on talking so he interrupted 
  her.

  "Thanks," he said, grinning tensely. "I think I'll just wait 
  until the rain stops, then fix it myself." She looked at him for 
  a moment, then turned to her companion. They had a quick 
  conference, then she turned back to him. "Get in. We'll drive 
  you to the gas station. We trust you," she tittered anxiously. 
  "We can't just leave you here."

  He nodded. She twisted in her seat and reached back to unlock 
  the door. _Why not just leave him alone? He doesn't want your_ 
  _help._ He climbed in and sat down. The windows were foggy.

  "...and this is MaryJo," said the driver. She had told him her 
  name first but he hadn't caught it and didn't want to ask her to 
  repeat herself. He thought it might be something like "Michael." 
  Her companion smiled and nodded. They were in their 40s or 50s, 
  dressed alike, with identical well-trimmed gray hair.
  _Dykes? Nuns? Both?_

  "From around here?" prompted the driver.

  "Larkspur," he said. "You?" he added in a polite afterthought. 
  They nodded, but said nothing.

  The driver turned on her blinker and began to pull out onto the 
  highway. A small alarm went off in his head. "Wait a sec. Forgot 
  something," he muttered. He scrambled out and went to his car, 
  then came running back clutching the wedding album under his 
  jacket. They waited until he had slammed the door again, then 
  moved out onto the asphalt.

  "Wedding album," he said, by way of explanation.

  "Oh," cried MaryJo. "Just married?"

  "Just divorced," he replied.

  There was a pause. "Oh," she said tonelessly.

  He began to flip through the pages. There they were, he and his 
  in-laws, getting ready for the reception. Planting flowers all 
  over the backyard, setting up tables, eating pizza. There they 
  were, his brother-in-law and the dark beauty of a wife he 
  divorced a year or two later, leaving her and their four kids 
  for his pushy business partner. There was his friend from 
  Phoenix and his wife, now his ex- wife. There was another one of 
  his friends, already divorced at the time of the wedding, the 
  one who had just survived a heart attack, the one who delighted 
  in telling the story about how the hospital scared his daughter 
  half to death the morning she brought him in with severe angina 
  by asking what religion he was. There was his wife's German 
  grandmother, whose 90th birthday celebration, produced by his 
  relentlessly positive father-in-law and immortalized on video by 
  his equally relentless brother-in-law, he had suffered through 
  not long ago. She was dead now, and a sweeter little old lady 
  had never blessed the face of the earth, despite her 
  disconcerting way of dropping a casually vicious reference to 
  "kikes" into the middle of her interminable stories about her 
  youth in Chicago. And there was the so-called Regent of the 
  Tibetan Buddhist sect his wife belonged to, the one who had been 
  too preoccupied with his official duties to inform his male 
  lovers that he was HIV-positive. And there was his wife, looking 
  remarkably young and happy. And there she was again, and again, 
  and again.

  "It was a Buddhist wedding," he remarked, apropos of nothing, 
  into the loud silence in the car. "She was a Buddhist. Is a 
  Buddhist."

  "Buddhist," said MaryJo cautiously. "We know some Buddhists, 
  don't we?"

  The driver nodded and glared out into the rain. "...perfectly 
  honest, I don't much care for them. That one that's always going 
  on about the wheel of dharma?"

  MaryJo didn't seem to have heard. At length she said, "Karma, 
  not dharma. That one?"

  "Samsara," he interjected, sounding a little harsher than he 
  intended. "Samsara is the one that is usually compared to a 
  wheel." He pushed his tongue against his teeth, finding the sore 
  place again.

  _Yeah, you could use a wheel right about now_. He remembered 
  Thomas the sculptor and his cement wheel, back in his student 
  days in Berkeley. _Yeah, even a cement one_. Then he thought of 
  John and the cement coffee table they had made at the beach, 
  casting it into a hole in the sand, then muscling it into John's 
  pickup when it had cured. They drove back to the house they 
  shared with their girlfriends, both of whom were named Margaret. 
  They backed the truck up to the front door and rolled it 
  straight into the living room. It was so heavy it made the floor 
  sag. There it sat until the party with the keg, the one where he 
  got so drunk he went for a ride with someone he barely knew to 
  East Oakland, where he wandered around, in and out of black 
  people's houses, for most of the evening. Finally someone called 
  a cab for him and back he rode to the party. _In fact, that was_
  _the time you woke up in the middle of the night, screwing John's_ 
  _Margaret, a split second before you both came, just as your_
  _Margaret walked in the one door of the bedroom and right out the_
  _other_. Out of the house, in fact. Out of his life.

  What a ride. From stupor to drunken consciousness to orgasm to 
  guilt and terror in less than a second. The only thing he had 
  experienced that was remotely like it was the time he fainted in 
  his mother-in-law's hospital room.

  "I just need to hang another bag of blood," the nurse had said. 
  And then they had stood there, him, his wife and his 
  sister-in-law, morbidly fascinated by the slow descent of the 
  red fluid down the IV line into Marian's arm. He remembered 
  deciding he needed to sit down. The next thing he knew, he was 
  coming out of blackness with a halo of anxious faces above him, 
  that same nurse in the center, raising her hand to slap him 
  again.

  "Interesting," he had mumbled. "You were snoring," his wife had 
  snapped. What he remembered most of all was the feeling of 
  enormous peace and pleasure, not shock or pain. _If that's what_
  _death is like, it's not so bad_. And that's what he kept telling 
  himself while he rode to the memorial service a month or so 
  later, the small, heavy cardboard box holding Marian's remains 
  on his lap.

  "What kind of work do you do?" asked MaryJo. Beside her, Michael 
  oversteered, both hands clamped on the wheel, making constant 
  small corrective motions.

  He didn't tell them he was an artist. Instead he told them about 
  the small company he owned, selling and servicing industrial 
  fire extinguishers. They made polite noises. "Today is payday," 
  he said. "And the payroll's back in the car. The boys at the 
  plant will be getting pretty upset when I don't show up with 
  their checks." MaryJo grunted and lit a cigarette.

  The van slowed and veered toward the shoulder. Ahead in the murk 
  he could see an old station wagon with a mottled paint job 
  parked alongside the road. They stopped in front of it and 
  honked. A young woman carrying a baby climbed out and ran up to 
  them. "Oh, thank you," she gasped opening the door and 
  clambering in beside him. "I thought I was stranded for sure."

  _Georgia, maybe. Or Tennessee. Definitely not a Texas accent._ 
  She was thin and blond, and her hair was very fine and straight. 
  She was also incredibly young.

  The baby began to fuss. She casually switched it to her other 
  arm, unbuttoned her blouse and held it to her breast. "This is 
  Gabriel," she said proudly. The baby continued to squirm, 
  sucking furiously. "I'm Alcie."

  "What's wrong with your car?" he asked, watching the baby 
  wriggle.

  She frowned at him, then said, "What's wrong with your tongue?"

  He stared at her. "Did I say something wrong?" He turned to the 
  window and stuck out his tongue. The red fissure was plainly 
  visible. The man driving the car next to them shot him a 
  disgusted look. The kids in the back stuck out their tongues at 
  him.

  Alcie was saying something to him. "I don't know. It just up and 
  quit. My husband always used to fix it for me, but he's gone." 
  _Kentucky_? He looked at her hand. No wedding ring.

  The album was open on his lap. There were the three couples 
  drinking sake before the ceremony. "That's my wife," he said. 
  "My ex-wife."

  "She looks drunk," said the girl.

  Then there was the picture of them all kneeling, no shoes on. 
  "It started late," he said to her, feeling a sudden serenity 
  sweep over him. "I told my friends to come at least an hour 
  late, but they came on time." _And had to sit there and sweat,_
  _the poor bastards._

  Then there were the pictures of the Regent striking the gong, 
  pictures of his wife offering the Regent a cup of tea, pictures 
  of her bowing, hands together, before the Regent, while the 
  Regent watched her, head inclined, peering up at her from under 
  his eyebrows. At that time the Regent had been plump. Now he was 
  much thinner.

  The baby gurgled. She turned him over and patted him 
  mechanically, blankly watching while he slowly turned the pages 
  of the album. After a while, she spoke to him. "Does that mean 
  that you're a Buddhist too?"

  He shook his head. "No."

  "An interfaith marriage," said Michael, a dismissive note in her 
  voice.

  "Not really," he replied. "I don't have any faith at all."

  Alcie looked at him obliquely. "Well, one thing I know for a 
  fact is that faithless marriages don't work either."

  He couldn't disagree and didn't want to explain. The car windows 
  were steamy and the air seemed unbearably close. He closed the 
  album and stared out the window. The car sailed on through the 
  wet gloom.

  The two women in the front seat exchanged a few soft words, and 
  MaryJo briefly consulted a map. They all sat that way, in rich, 
  exhausted silence, until the car nosed toward an exit. "Here we 
  are," Michael said, as the car came to a stop next to a tilting 
  dumpster. He got out, stretched, and headed toward the office, 
  leaving the album behind.

  "Say," called Alice. "You forgot something." He ignored her and 
  kept on walking, pushing his tongue against his teeth to feel 
  the sore place.


  Eric Skjei  (75270.1221@compuserve.com)
-----------------------------------------

  Eric Skjei is a senior writer at Autodesk in Marin County, 
  California. He lives in Stinson Beach with his laptop and his 
  kayak.


  The Burdens of Love  Chris Kmotorka
=====================================
...................................................................
  * Some people prop themselves on a moral high ground, passing 
  judgment until the Lord elects to contradict them. Other people, 
  well... they do what they gotta do. *
...................................................................

  "Goddamn it, Gary," I said as I saw the news flash. I said it 
  softly, silently even, to myself like a mother at her wit's end. 
  Except I'm not his mother, I'm his wife. I sometimes wonder if 
  there's a difference; sometimes I wonder if there should be.

  I've been sitting here on the couch watching TV for an hour now, 
  waiting for the six o'clock news. I always watch the news, but a 
  few minutes ago they came on and said they're going to have a 
  story about a bank robbery that happened really close to where 
  we live, only about a mile or two to the southeast, depending on 
  how it is you go, from where I'm sitting right now. There's 
  going to be this story, but all they've done so far is describe 
  this guy as being tall, six-one or six-two, thick, collar-length 
  blonde hair and a mustache, late twenties, early thirties. 
  Nothing real particular, your typical northern Michigan weekend 
  bank robber type. I've always had a weakness for that kind of 
  guy: a little bit of trouble, nothing too dangerous, just enough 
  to keep things interesting. I guess it's not so surprising then 
  that Gary and I have been together for so long. He's exactly 
  like that in the looks department. It's close to three years 
  now, married almost half that -- sixteen months. But now I 
  wonder what's going to happen to us.

  We've been through a lot, Gary and me. Not all of it so good 
  you'd tell your friends and family about it, but we've had good 
  times and we've never done anything to hurt anyone else. Not on 
  purpose anyway. At any rate, you can't even call it _real_ bank 
  robbery. Just one drive through, two counter spots, and an ATM. 
  Small time even as bank branches go. Whoever did it had an easy 
  time of it. But robbing banks is big time, no matter how small 
  the bank, how small the chunk of change you get. And you almost 
  _always_ get caught.

  After the news we're supposed to go out to eat and then to the 
  Fireplace Inn for a few drinks. They have a great country band 
  out there on the weekends. We're celebrating. Gary helped my 
  brother with a sheet rock job and we finally have a little bit 
  of spending money. Things have been pretty tight since the money 
  from the house ran out. I was beginning to think we were going 
  to have another fire, and I could tell that Gary was thinking 
  the same thing, saving all the extra papers from the _Journal_ 
  route that he runs Sunday mornings and all. That may sound kind 
  of strange, but it's happened before. We lost everything we 
  owned that wasn't with us in the car. I have to admit that 
  wasn't much, but even the little things add up when you have to 
  start from scratch. It's not like we doused the house in gas and 
  lit a match or anything.

  What we did was, we started stacking up old newspapers in front 
  of the furnace, and we let the lint build up in the dryer. 
  Little things that add up, you might say. That was when we were 
  living in Saginaw, a couple of months after we were married. 
  Gary had lost his job working the oil rigs and things were 
  looking kind of bleak. I was really sad when he lost that job. 
  Don't get me wrong, it wasn't because of the money, although it 
  was pretty rough being without it all of a sudden like that. I 
  was sad for romantic reasons. We had our wedding ceremony in a 
  clearing in the middle of a cornfield beside an operational rig. 
  We had wanted to have it up on a platform tower, but we couldn't 
  get the preacher -- Deaconess, really; Sister LaTicia Wallace -- 
  to climb up there. So we had to settle for the pump in the 
  cornfield. But I'll never forget it. I'll always have a soft 
  spot for oil derricks.

  We were clear across town visiting Gary's mom and dad when we 
  heard about the fire. We rushed back home, fast as we could, but 
  when we got there the fire department had already put it out and 
  there wasn't much left of it but a big wet pile of stinking, 
  steaming wood. The smell of smoke and ruin was in everything, 
  you couldn't miss the finality of it all. We moved into a 
  trailer on Gary's parents' lot and waited for the new house to 
  be built, brand spanking new and owned free and clear thanks to 
  the glories of a healthy insurance policy. Insurance is the one 
  thing Gary and I have always seemed to agree on. I may get a 
  couple of months behind on my utilities, dodging the shutoff 
  notices and recorded messages and all, but my insurance premiums 
  are always paid on time. That's because Gary lost a house once 
  before. Which means an accident here could stir up a lot of 
  trouble and questions from the insurance companies, what with 
  two fires in less than a year and another one only a few years 
  before that. Especially since the insurance was in my name on 
  our last place and it's the same here. They'd start screaming 
  arson so fast, whether they had any evidence or not, which they 
  wouldn't. There can't be evidence of arson if we didn't set the 
  fire.


  So anyway, the news finally comes on and the anchor is 
  describing this guy and asking for anyone with any information 
  regarding the robber to call the station to let them know, and 
  then they go to a commercial. For a second I get this scared 
  feeling and look towards the bedroom, but I put it out of my 
  mind soon enough because I doubt they'll get any calls. I don't 
  see too many of us rushing out to inconvenience ourselves over 
  some small time crime that will get us little more than a court 
  appearance. Traverse may not be a really big city, yet, but it's 
  definitely a place where people are smart enough to know that 
  it's better to wait for _Missing/Reward_ or
  _America's Most Wanted_, or one of those shows, because at least 
  then you know you're going to get something out of the deal. I 
  watch them both; I'm waiting for a crime that I know something 
  about, but I suppose the chances of that are pretty darn slim. 
  Basically, the community ethic/goodwill thing just doesn't cut 
  it anymore. It's too easy to get hurt doing that trip.

  I had an uncle, Uncle Ryan, who got killed doing the good deed 
  activity. Uncle Ryan was a traveling salesman. Bathroom 
  fixtures. He was twisting his way through the mountains of 
  southeastern Kentucky when he got killed. There are these signs 
  down there, all throughout the mountains that say
  _Fallen Rock Zone_. They used to have signs that said
  _Watch For Falling Rocks_, except you never see any rocks 
  actually falling, and people were spending more time looking for 
  the damn things to fall than they were looking at the road. I 
  guess that's why they made the change. Anyway, Uncle Ryan 
  actually saw a rock in the road. Now, just because people don't 
  actually see the rocks fall doesn't mean that they don't. There 
  are rocks the size of Yugos and all sorts of smaller boulders 
  all along the sides of the roads. It's just that you don't see 
  these things _in_ the road. Well, Uncle Ryan sees this rock and 
  his first inclination is that someone is going to get hurt with 
  that rock being in the other lane like that and there being a 
  blind curve right there and no real way for oncoming traffic to 
  see the rock, so Uncle Ryan pulls his car off to the side of the 
  road as far as he can and he gets out. He walks over, bends 
  down, grabs hold of the rock and starts to lift it. He had 
  enough time to get halfway up with it when a huge coal hauler 
  came hurtling around that blind curve Uncle Ryan was so 
  concerned about and hit him dead center on the grill. Four days 
  later we had a closed casket ceremony and to this day I'm 
  convinced that it simply doesn't pay to go out of your way to 
  help someone else if there's nothing in it for you. That may be 
  a hard thing to say, but I tend to think that these are hard 
  times.


  I'm waiting till after the news to wake Gary up. He's sleeping 
  in the other room. I should wake him up and make him watch the 
  news with me, see what he says, but I need time to think. And he 
  needs his rest, though how he can sleep I'll never know. He 
  picked up a quarter pound of weed from my brother-in-law who 
  lives just down the road on the street behind ours. The dope's 
  mainly to sell, of course, but we usually skim off half an ounce 
  or so. Once it's all divided up, no one notices. Still, I have 
  to keep an eye on him to make sure he doesn't take too much. I 
  have to keep reminding him that it's an investment. You have to 
  be responsible where investments are concerned. Sometimes I 
  think love is a lot like baby-sitting. But that's okay. Love 
  should be a burden. I've always thought that, at least for as 
  long as I've felt I know what love is.

  My mom knew real love. Love was never easy for her. I mean, 
  maybe at one time it was, but not that I can remember. My dad 
  had Multiple Sclerosis, and it was hard on mother the last few 
  years of his life. He had gone virtually blind and was in a 
  wheelchair; he used to say over and over, "I ain't a baby, I can 
  do it." He said it about everything we tried to do for him, but, 
  of course, he couldn't. He'd wear himself out trying, and then 
  sit there quiet with his eyes all wet looking while Mom or one 
  of us kids helped him out. He had been a policeman and had 
  always been active. The MS didn't really start affecting him 
  till he was in his early thirties. My brother and sister and I 
  were all very young. By the time I was ten or eleven, it seemed 
  like he had always been in that wheelchair. His speech got to be 
  real difficult to understand as well. He'd get upset over it. I 
  can't blame him, now. I hate having to repeat myself, and my 
  speech is perfectly clear. Mom had to take care of him like he 
  was a child. And with three little kids running around on top of 
  it all, it was hard on her. That's how I know what love is all 
  about, how it has to be a burden to be real.


  When I first met Gary I was working at a country bar called The 
  Roundup, a little north of Thompsonville. He was up fishing 
  along the Platte River and had been driving around looking for a 
  place to get a steak and have a few beers. The Roundup is about 
  the most perfect place around for that sort of thing. Anyway, I 
  was serving him, and I guess I must have been pretty obvious, 
  bending over and letting him have a peek or two at the goods, 
  and other tricks I still haven't been able to stop using since I 
  did a little time as a prostitute. Down in Detroit. I left that 
  all behind. It's been practically fifteen years now since I got 
  out of that life.

  It's weird when I think back on it. It hurts, too. Sometimes I 
  want to cry over it, like a black secret I'm always trying to 
  hide from the rest of the world. I didn't do it for long, but it 
  was too long just the same. I don't even know how it happened. I 
  mean, I do, but I have a hard time believing I ever did it. I 
  was in the Navy. I had a good job working as a missile mechanic, 
  which I also can't believe I ever did. I only joined to get my 
  GED and because I couldn't find a job. Anyway, one night I went 
  out with a guy I met at a bar and we got to partying. I was gone 
  the whole weekend, went AWOL, and I was afraid to go back. I 
  couldn't call home. I needed money and it seemed like an easy 
  enough way of getting some. Next thing I knew I was dishonorably 
  discharged and sitting on a bus back to Michigan. I went right 
  back to it in Detroit. I got into all sorts of other bad things, 
  too, including smack. As far as I know there's still an 
  outstanding warrant for my arrest there. For loitering of all 
  things. That's what they bust you for when they can't get you on 
  anything else.

  I suppose I'd still be there today if it hadn't been for my 
  brother. He drove down from Traverse City to find me, and when 
  he did he grabbed me and forced me to go home with him. I guess 
  it was kidnapping, really. I hated him for it at the time, but 
  now I'm grateful. I went through withdrawal at home. My mother's 
  new husband wouldn't let her take me to the hospital. He was 
  afraid of what everyone would think if they found out. All I did 
  was cry and hurt, and scream at them. I couldn't keep my food 
  down. Every part of me hurt so bad, all I wanted was to die -- 
  but I didn't. I suppose that if Jerry hadn't come down there for 
  me I probably _would_ be dead now. As it is, my insides were so 
  screwed up that I'll never be able to have children. I had to 
  have a hysterectomy. That hurts me a lot now that I'm married 
  and all. I told Gary it was a congenital thing. He doesn't know 
  about my old life -- all six months of it. I don't know what I'd 
  do if he ever found out. I guess that's just another part of my 
  burden.


  Gary's been really good for me. The idea of having someone to 
  take care of has straightened me out a lot. I've done my share 
  of time in the Grand Traverse County Jail since I've been up 
  here. I've been busted for everything from passing phony checks 
  and writing bogus prescriptions to dealing. Gary knows most of 
  that; it's not as if he has a spotless record himself. You can't 
  keep everything a secret. Keeping everything inside will only 
  drive you crazy. I've managed to stay out of trouble since I 
  started seeing Gary, though. I guess it has a lot to do with 
  being so busy taking care of him. I haven't had the time, or the 
  need, to do anything wrong. At least, not until Gary lost his 
  job. That's when we started back into dealing. We only sell pot, 
  though. If I had to go in front of the judge again for speed or 
  acid, I don't think I'd get off as easily as I have before. It's 
  not that I think selling pot is wrong. I don't. A little weed 
  never hurt anybody. There are studies that proved that. The 
  thing I feel sort of guilty about is how we got the money to buy 
  our first stash. We didn't rob a bank or anything like that, but 
  in a way it was kind of worse. What we did was take a bunch of 
  stuff from my mom's house and sell it. That's not something I'm 
  very proud of. It was mostly camping gear and tools that had 
  belonged to my father, stuff that was going to just sit there 
  until it rotted. I tried to make myself feel better by telling 
  myself that, but then all I saw was my father in that wheelchair 
  before he died, all shriveled and depressed by all of the things 
  he could no longer do, and I could see why my mother held on to 
  it all and I just felt worse about it. She needed the memory and 
  I took it away from her.

  When Gary and I started going out it was pretty obvious that he 
  needed me. He's a lousy housekeeper and he can't cook, either. 
  He lived on McDonald's and Burger King and pizza. I moved to 
  Saginaw to live with him after only two weekends together. I put 
  his house in order and started buying his clothes for him. I 
  even cut his hair. I had taken a mail-order cosmetology course 
  after I dropped out of high school and I think I'm still pretty 
  good at it, even though I've never actually worked in a salon, 
  or anything. I had to take over paying the bills, too. Gary made 
  good money working the oil fields, but he had no idea how to 
  manage it. Everything was past due. By the time we decided to 
  get married we were living a life I never thought I would ever 
  have. Once you've done some of the things I've done, you almost 
  give up dreaming of the normal life. You kind of give up on 
  love, too. But when I met Gary, I knew right then that it was 
  possible. And it was.

  When Gary came in a couple of hours ago with all that money, I 
  couldn't believe it. I didn't think the work he was doing with 
  Jerry was going to be finished til next week, and that was when 
  he was supposed to get paid. But like Gary said, Jerry realized 
  how much we needed the money and paid him in advance. Gary 
  walked in with a fifth of Jack Daniels from the corner store and 
  a grocery sack with that quarter pound in it. At first I was 
  kind of angry, money being as tight as it is, that Gary would be 
  so irresponsible. But we haven't been out in a long time and 
  it's good to let loose once in a while. We've always liked to 
  kick back and have a drink and watch TV. And the thought of 
  going out to dinner and then dancing to a good band sounded real 
  nice, so I went pretty easy on him. Sometimes I swear he's just 
  a kid.

  I keep saying to myself that the proof of true love is in 
  bearing the burden, but I have to admit that sometimes I have my 
  doubts. Sometimes I think that Gary could have a decent job if 
  he wanted; he's just too lazy to go out and get one. I know he 
  was offered a job on a disposal truck, but he's too proud to 
  allow himself to be called a garbage man. I don't know what the 
  big deal is; garbage men get paid really well as far as I know. 
  But after losing his job in the oil fields, there's nothing else 
  he wants to do. He loved working the rigs. We've talked about 
  moving out to California, or Alaska, so Gary could work the 
  offshore rigs, thirty days on, thirty days off, but it hardly 
  ever gets any further than talk. It seems that every time we get 
  started, we tell our families, start selling off stuff, and the 
  whole thing just falls through. I don't know if I'd like it 
  anyway. I love Gary and all that, but thirty days without him at 
  a time doesn't seem reasonable at all. How am I supposed to take 
  care of him when he's out there on the ocean in some tower 
  hundreds of feet in the air? Guys get killed out there all of 
  the time. I guess that's why they get paid so much. Not having 
  him around would be like some kind of part-time love, an 
  occasional demand. I'm afraid that somewhere along the line 
  while Gary was gone I'd end up drifting right back into the dead 
  end life I thought I'd escaped.

  Lately I've been wondering if maybe we shouldn't take what we 
  can get in the back of the Camaro and just slip out of here some 
  night without telling anyone, without doing anything to jinx it. 
  Skip out on the landlord, cancel our renter's policy and wind 
  off down the road. Listening to the news about bank robbers 
  practically in my own back yard is making me think that that's 
  exactly what we should be doing. We could go to Florida, if not 
  out west. It would be warm; I can feel the winter wind picking 
  up around here lately. It won't be long before the windows are 
  frosted over in the mornings and the leaves will be turning 
  brown and falling. The changes happen so quickly and so suddenly 
  that you can't help but think in terms of time passing away 
  before your eyes.

  When the news comes back on with the complete details of the 
  robbery, something beyond the vague description and the request 
  for information, I'm up from the couch and fixing myself a 
  drink. Jack Daniels and orange Slice. I prefer kahlua and cream, 
  or tequila, but we finished both the night before. There's a 
  tiny little bit of kahlua in the bottom of the bottle, and I'm 
  saving that to put on top of my ice cream after the bar. I take 
  a deep swallow of the drink and as an afterthought I fill the 
  glass back up with more whiskey. I'm trying to listen to the 
  story and pick up the living room at the same time. Gary's 
  jacket is draped over my arm and I'm sitting on the edge of the 
  couch, listening and sipping at my drink, which is now too 
  strong to take big drinks from.

  Apparently this guy just walked into the Interlochen branch of 
  the Old Kent bank early this afternoon and gave the teller a 
  note that said he had a gun and wanted all the money. A real 
  creative sort. There's no mention if he actually showed a gun or 
  not, so he probably didn't. Those tellers can be such airheads. 
  You wouldn't catch me handing over money to a small town geek 
  with a note. Not unless I could figure out a way to pocket some 
  for myself, that is. But I don't think I have to worry about 
  ever being in that situation. With my record I doubt that I 
  would be hired as a bank teller.

  The guy took off on foot across the field behind the bank to the 
  northwest. He was dressed in jeans and had on a tan waist-length 
  jacket and a maroon baseball cap. I look back towards our 
  bedroom and wonder if I shouldn't lock all the doors and latch 
  the windows. I laugh at the thought despite everything going 
  through my head because I'm having a hard time telling myself 
  there's no need to lock anybody out -- Gary's already in. This 
  isn't exactly the kind of place a dangerous criminal would hole 
  up anyway; and I know for a fact I could handle the type that 
  might. No, the only reason anyone would come here is because 
  they live here, or maybe to read a meter or collect for a bill. 
  Other than that, it doesn't hold a lot of promise.

  I shut the television off and stand there for a second trying to 
  decide whether I should wake Gary up now or let him sleep a 
  little longer while I get ready to go. I guess I'll let him 
  sleep, that way he won't be in my way. He's pretty much a pain 
  when he's in the bathroom with me. It's almost impossible to put 
  on mascara and curl my lashes while he's trying to squeeze his 
  head around me to get at the sink to brush his teeth. I'll get 
  myself ready and then wake up Gary. That way he can sit on the 
  toilet as long as he wants and I can sit back and relax with 
  another drink.

  Standing at the closet I hold up Gary's jacket and inspect it 
  before I put it on a hanger. It's getting a bit worn. Now that 
  we have a little bit of money, maybe it's time I bought Gary a 
  new jacket. Rather than hang it in the closet I roll the jacket 
  up tight, carry it into the kitchen and shove it down into the 
  trash. We'll go to the mall before dinner and find Gary a nice 
  new jacket. Maybe one with some color to it, something not so 
  drab. It's time for a change, I think. A good, lightweight, 
  bright jacket, and maybe I'll give him a fresh haircut. Kind of 
  a new beginning. Because the way I see it, we may be heading 
  west sooner than I had thought.


  Chris Kmotorka (ckmotorka@pimacc.pima.edu)
--------------------------------------------
  
  Chris Kmotorka earned his MFA at Western Michigan University in 
  June, 1993. He is currently teaching writing at Pima Community 
  College in Tucson, Arizona. He is 30 years old, married, and has 
  two daughters, ages 9 and 11.


  FYI
=====

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      If Abe Lincoln were alive today... he'd be _really_ old.
                       
..

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