She arrived in a dented white SUV and parked on the weedy street leaving one door open. Her coat was slightly moth-eaten and her sallow face with its poster smile tried to look its best without going for a cigarette. We sat on the porch and near the empty pool and inside at the white tablecloth dining set and she bulked up slightly as she talked, her cheeks puffing out, her hair taking on new puffs.
She’d been a survivor, with her husband doing things in the pool halls and gentleman’s clubs and ordering sleazy burgers at all hours of the night in the long motels that lined the motorways. She’d made an escape out of smoking and spending hours doing the laundry when it didn’t need to be made and her mouth still made random smoke-sucking motions. I tried to organize my questions about liberation and the tourism industry and the incapacitating darkness that was overtaking certain areas of the state, but she deflected my questions with a series of non sequiturs and ellipse-broken phrases about the things she had done for the snack industry and the pest-removal sector.
I was embarrassed when she didn’t get the proper respect from my family. When my father looked through the hallway in his favored faded t-shirt and salmon robe, reminding me of my chores. Or my unimpressed mother who interrupted the governor with insistent questions about what she was doing to thicken newspapers and put meatier vegetables into the generic soup. My mother had a preoccupation with carrots and their proper percentages and the governor became sidetracked trying to address these issues of roots and circumferences.
We were outside for a time in the hot tub, the one that we’d bought in bulk, under the unadorned branches of the walnut tree. The governor now talking in an unstopping explanation, unprompted, defending her positions on gas station toiletries, shopping mall concrete, paragraphs separating the institutions from fat and salt, library directories of unsanitary stopping outlooks and the institutionalization of interspersed parks for reviewing trees. The security she’d brought stood outside the hot tub, sometimes shuffling and desiring a hot dog, running a hand over his thin, plastered hair and adjusting his cheap glasses.
Despite everything, she was still the governor. She’d arrived of her own volition and she was answering the questions in the style to which she was accustomed, ignoring, shellacking over my hesitant hints about her past. All of her attention was on the rig-crowded highways of the state’s condition, all of her body was devoted to the policies generated and messaged to her from roadhouses and fishing holes. She had her preferences for coating over everything with layers of pebbles and macadam until it all matched the resolutions, the drafts, the bylaws that had been negotiated.
Finally, when things were turning the color of umber and we’d run out of the glazed pastries, she walked off of the patio and, with her coat clutched around her, she found her way back to the vehicle, the security bloated in his white shirt, with a Styrofoam cup, holding the door open, his shoes speckled with mud. I hadn’t remembered all of the answers I wanted to get, but I had a photo of the governor on the porch, her hair looking thin, gazing away at a sign on the road. And I had some excerpts of quotes when she made some candid remarks about the bakery outlet and her thoughts on teachers who hadn’t been inspiring to her. I watched her drive away down the dirt road, mother in the background, with just about the exact amount of ruefulness that I’d expected.
Tag Archive: surrealism
They reached the planet of the orange oceans after three tedious Earth Years in the Silver Tubular.
Captain Malcolm stepped out onto the planet in his periwinkle blue space jumpsuit and surveyed the landscape.
“I see several orange oceans,” he transmitted back to the ship through his helmet transponder.
He had visited planets with orange oceans before, but none quite like this one. Here, the orange oceans were incredibly large, bigger than the biggest Earth lakes, and they could be seen in profusion from the top of the bluff where Captain Malcolm stood.
Second Officer Bailey stood at his side. Bailey looked prepared and stolid, ready to be unfazed by whatever oceans might face him.
“I’ve heard orange oceans harbor rich populations of black fish,” said Bailey. “Black fish! I’ve never tasted one.” Bailey was a simple farm boy at heart, with lots of wheat experience.
Malcolm laughed heartily. “You’ll taste many a black fish before we leave this planet, Officer Bailey. We will feast in the Silver Tubular, on black fish pan-seared and drizzled with a delicate almond-lemon sauce. Black fish filleted and accompanied with a spring salad of fresh greens and new potatoes. Black fish baked in a rich cheese casserole dotted with green olives and peas.”
Bailey took a moment to ponder this fish dinner vision, but his reverie was interrupted by a shout from Third Officer Liston. “Captain! I’ve sighted air octopi! Hovering over the orange ocean gulf!”
Malcolm peered down toward where Liston stood, on a boulder shaped like the skull of a demented crone, the mega-magnifying super-scopes glued to his eyes.
“Air octopi! How far off?”
Liston cried out, using his most alarming voice. “They’re within seconds of us, flying like they’re mad as freakin’ wombats out of hell!”
Bailey was shaken completely out of his fish reverie. “Jeez, Captain! Air octopi! They can strangle a man to death with their tentacles in seconds! And these jumpsuits we’re wearing are no protection at all.”
Malcolm pursed his lips. “You’re right, Bailey. I can send a distress signal to the Silver Tubular, but by the time the ship can send reinforcements armed with enough laser targeting bombasts to destroy the air octopi, it will be far too late.”
“We should have come armed!” cried Bailey.
Malcolm turned to him, in a petulant fury. “Who knew there would be air octopi on a planet of orange oceans?”
“Did you even ask the ship oceanographer?”
Malcolm scoffed. “Patterson? The one who predicted we’d find coral reefs on Laxxo 729?”
“You’ve put as all at risk with your egotistical foohardiness! Your crazed determination to be the first galactic Captain to step foot on the Planet of Orange Oceans!” Bailey turned to Malcolm in a fit of space rage and throttled the Captain’s neck with his gloved hands. They rolled over the gray stones, locked in a battle of grim proportions.
Even as they rolled in conflict on the rocks, the slapping of air octopi tentacles could be heard from below, as the relentless white alien octopi attacked Liston, slapping at him mercilessly with their unfeeling octopi limbs.
Liston cried out, emitting an unsettling, shrill scream that ended only when his pain-drenched face was pulled below the orange waves by his unstoppable octopus assailant.
Malcolm gasped, even as Bailey’s hands closed around his throat. “Don’t. Don’t, Bailey. You’re . . . becoming like . . . them.” But Malcolm’s eyes closed in agony even as the white air octopi descended on Bailey, their furious tentacles waving in murderous patterns.
The flailing octopi limbs whirled in a frenzy of rubbery destruction until only bruised and mangled human body parts littered the forlorn rocks on the planet of the orange oceans.
“Behold the palpitating near-orbs of those magnificent jellies!”
Commander Mayfield stared out at the Sea of Impatience with the ecstatic gaze of a young boy in possession of his first yo-yo. Swimming toward the shore in disciplined ranks, he could clearly make out the pulsating domes of the famed telepathic jellyfish that gave their name to the small, gray and reasonably mysterious Planet of the Telepathic Jellyfish.
“What’s our reading on the Telepathometer, Dr. Finbone?” Mayfield brusquely asked the bewhiskered scientist. Finbone was diligently bent over his multi-leveled, large knobbed orange instrument with the intensity borne of years of study under the great Telepathometer specialist, Cravore the Brain. Cravore’s research into detecting telepathic activity among aquatic species had brought him nothing but ridicule, catcalls and detention during his life, but posthumously he was now the favorite scientist of several paranormal fan boys and was featured on at least one neon, mid-galactic floating billboard.
“I’ve never seen results like this.” Finbone couldn’t take his eyes off the pulsating dots on the Mentoscreen as he replied in his clipped voice, pickled in the brine of thousands of dry and vinegary facts. “We’re picking up over fifty telepath transmissions. According to my best calculations, the transmissions are all coming from that direction.” Finbone pointed with a quavering finger out to the Sea of Impatience where the rows of fifty glowing jellyfish made their eerie, inexorable way ever closer to shore.
“Then the legends are true!” Mayfield cried. “These creatures are among the only saltwater life forms in the universe who can truly communicate with one another via mental signal.”
“Don’t be too sure,” Finbone abruptly cautioned. He tore himself away from the busy Mentoscreen, and faced Mayfield, all of his science seriousness focused on the goggle-eyed officer from Space Command. “The creatures could be cleverly producing a screen of telepath-transmission-like signals, deceiving our primitive human equipment and deluding us into following a false lead, while they fiendishly conduct their real operations unbeknownst to us in front of, or behind, our very eyes!”
“A shrewd insight, Finbone. But then, wouldn’t this planet be known as The Planet of the Jellyfish Who Produce Deceptively Telepathic-Like Signals?”
“Ha, ha, ha.” Finbone laughed a hearty space laugh and shook his head, bemused by the eternal innocence of Space Commanders in their Space Commander suits. “That is where you’re wrong, Mayfield. Clearly, those who came before us were too literal-minded to penetrate the ruses perpetrated by these canny sea-jellies.”
Mayfield clenched his jaw. Salty sweat poured profusely from his forehead. Finbone’s rigorous analysis of jellyfish strategy had turned all of his preconceptions upside down. If the jellyfish were not truly telepathic, the entire purpose of the mission was put into question. What would be the point of capturing a jellyfish so that it could communicate with the unique telepathic giant squid bagged on the Planet of the Gargantuan Ocean Species if the shrewd invertebrates were not truly clairvoyant? Yet how could he question the expert opinion of Finbone, the man who had written the definitive textbook on water-dwelling creatures who possessed thin, stinging tentacles: “Jellorama”?
“Those jellies are coming every closer,” cried Mayfield, the glowing translucent bubble-domes just yards away from the anxious commander. Mayfield’s self-restraint was evaporating, like a spilled puddle of vodka being sucked up by a relentless desert sun. He shouted out to his sea-borne antagonists. “If you’re so telepathic why don’t you transmit to me, jellies? Don’t you hear me, with your invisible ears? Or do you ignore me to frustrate me in my land-based limitations!” Mayfield fell to his knees on the pebbly beach, raising his fists skyward in supplication. “Why do you torment me, ambiguous creatures of the Planet of the Telepathic Jellyfish? Why do you mock my limited, non-telepathic human mind with your unfathomable contradictions?”
It was then that Finbone attempted to cry out, but instead could only stick his fingers anxiously in his mouth in a dry heave of fright. Behind Mayfield a mammoth black Borfa Bear had unexpectedly appeared on the beach with all the stealth of a silent vampire creeping up to a night-blooming camellia. With four relentless swings of his huge and effectively-clawing left paw, the Borfa pummeled Mayfield until the confused commander lay on the cold pebbles, his suit and dead flesh a messy set of intermingled, stringy ribbons. Finbone, still silently shrieking, ran heedlessly into the ocean, fleeing the ravenous Borfa. The scientist did not even consider that as he swam out into the chilly Sea of Impatience, he was heading straight for the deadly, stinging, pale-gray tentacles of the silent jellies, jellies that still ruled, in nearly unquestioned aquatic dominance over the waters of the Planet of the Telepathic Jellfyish.
A desolate parking lot. Two beat-up American cars are parked next to a Laundromat.
TIDI comes out of the Laundromat holding a huge basket of clothes and heads toward the larger car. She’s overweight, wearing hip huggers and a loud print blouse. She drops the basket on the ground and shouts back toward the Laundromat.
TIDI
Whites done dryin’?
HUPE
(off-stage)
Not yet.
Tidi takes a cigarette from her purse and lights up.
TIDI
(shouting)
You ‘member that scrawny little amputee monkey we saw at the zoo? That sure was a pathetic specimen! Eloise, she always did have a thing for monkeys. Not that there was nothin’ bizarre about it. She just loved to see ‘em, swinging tree to tree. Watched those monkey shows on the cable almost every day. You foldin’ them undies yet?
HUPE
(off-stage)
Ain’t done yet. In the dryer.
TIDI
(shouting)
Jesus and the Lord above, that is the slowest dryer in the whole darn laundrymat. Why d’you always pick the slowest, Hupe?
Tidi takes a long drag on her cigarette.
TIDI
(shouting)
You were never no good at the laundry, that’s the Lord’s truth. How many times did you ruin Hupe Jr.’s track outfit? How many, Hupe?
HUPE
(off-stage)
I don’t know, Tidi.
TIDI
(shouting)
It was a blamed nuisance, and a cost! That boy has enough troubles in this world, what with his skew-eye and short thumb, and you go and make his shorts pink as the day is long! What kind of a dad is that, Hupe?
BURNY, a fat, bald Scot, runs up to Tidi with a large butcher knife and stabs her in the right thigh three times. Blood spurts out. Tidi screams pathetically. Burny runs off.
Tidi collapses and rolls into the gutter at the curb.
TIDI
(screaming)
Hupe! Hupe!
HUPE
(off-stage)
No, they ain’t done dryin’ yet, Tidi! Shut your trap!
TIDI
(screaming)
Help me, Hupe!
HUPE
(off-stage)
I’m doin’ what I can!
TIDI
Jesus, Lord almighty in that heaven. What did I ever do to fall in a gutter, bleeding like a headless chicken?
Another geyser of blood spurts out. The lights in the laundry flicker and slowly dim.
TIDI
I washed so many clothes in this laundrymat. Washed ‘em til they was bare of thread and dim of color. Lord, how many times did I watch them dryers spinning. Around and around. Then around some more. It’s like some stupid chimp, chasing his own tail. How much change . . . How much change . . .
(screaming)
Hupe!
HUPE
(off-stage)
These undies ain’t even clean, Tidi. What kinda shit-ass detergent did you buy this time?
TIDI
(weeping)
The undies ain’t even clean. Ain’t even clean.
[BLACKOUT]
