The Misunderstanding

The waiting room smelled of Iodine and diaper plastic. I really don’t know what I was doing there.

In the corner, a battered mini playset wavered, faded colors as tired as the mothers watching their toddlers attempt to re-enact the cold war. In one corner, the three year old equivalent of Stalin rained destruction down from his wobbly Olympus, hurling block after wooden block at a rather confused looking two year old. Beside me, what I took for his mother murmured excuses for him, not glancing at the dog-eared Good Housekeeping magazine in her lap.

“Tired.” She murmurs. “He’s had allergies, too. Poor thing.” The poor thing in question ricochets a plastic spatula off a girl’s ear. She cries.

I look down at my magazine, and then up again. How are these rooms so oppressive? I feel so out of place, a twenty-something male in a predominantly young female domain. Even the children know I don’t belong.

A mother is called, gathers her child and leaves. I fiddle with my phone, check my inbox (empty), start up angry birds (Beaten), open facebook (nothing new). Baby Stalin appears to have another child in a headlock. The mother’s excuses are growing more farfetched.

“The economy.” She murmurs. “Hurricanes. Global warming. Microsoft.”

“Matthias Ransom.” The nurse looks at me. I rise, straighten my jacket, and follow her down the hall.

The doctor is a weary looking man in his early sixties, sad grey eyes staring from behind a slender pair of spectacles.

“What can I do for you?”

“I need to know if a young woman by the name of Selena Blaire came in here a few days ago.”

“People come in all the time, Mr. Ransom. I can’t be expected to remember all of them.”

“About six feet tall? Stunningly beautiful? Early twenties, bright red hair?”

“Oh, her.”

“She had a child with her.” I said. “A little boy. I need to know how he was.”

“He was healthy. There was something about him…” the doctor tapped his stubbled chin with his computer stylus.

“His eyes were mismatched. One was green and the other was yellowish. A golden color.”

“That’s impossible, the boy I’m talking about has dark eyes.”

“Believe what you want. This kid had two differently colored eyes. And he was big, for five.”

I thought for a moment. Had Selena already started on him? Was I too late?

“Thank you, Doctor.”

“Mr. Ransom. Is the child in question kidnapped?”

“No sir.” I said quickly. “Just a small misunderstanding.”

Catalaunia: Fugitives Quest

This is the beginning of my possible sequel.

It was a day for change.

Sunbird sat alone in the tavern, a half filled tankard of hard ale warming slowly on the table, the cool lacquered pebbles at the bottom doing it little good. A brass gauntlet lay next to the tankard, the dark, calloused hand wrapped around the pewter vessel.

He was dressed in his signature brass armor, the slitted helmet laying next to the gauntlet on the table, his weapons dropped on the floor, but just in reach. He was given a wide berth by the other patrons, the heavily wrapped tensung and humans around him recognizing, if not the armor, then at least his sigil, engraved on the front of the breastplate. A phoenix, wrapped in its own flame, hatching its clutch by its own death.

“Are you Quasan Jev?” A female voice asked him.

“Rates are subject to change, dependant on the difficulty of the job. Transportation must be provided, but not food. Also, I am not to be adressed by my former name. Sunbird will suffice.” His eyes focused on a slender, pretty face, attached to a similarly describable body.

“Oh no, sir, I don’t wish to hire you.”

“Well, I don’t want to hire you either.”

“I am not here to seduce you. I have a message for Quasan Jev.” She was looking at him earnestly, with a serious, frank gaze. Human, height between five two and five five. Considered pretty, between eighty eight and one hundred pounds, not more. Skin suggestive of northern upbringing.

“Spit it out.” Sunbird slurred, and then took a drink.

“In private.” She said firmly.

“No matter how pretty you think you are, you can’t kill me.” Sunbird snapped, suddenly alert. She wouldn’t be the first female to try to avenge her husband.

“I don’t wish to kill you, I only need to speak with you.” Sunbird stared at her a moment, his grey eyes searching her blue ones.

“Fine.” He said, rather loudly. He slammed the tankard on the polished wooden table, dropped two pecks on the table, the coins ringing, and gathered his things. As he walked out the door he replaced his helmet. She followed him as he ignored the icy blast of air that struck his fire-warmed armor, steaming as snow hit it. He gathered his ice-white cloak about him, and strode into an alley. The wind was blocked, and the cold lessened, but Sunbird watched as the blonde messenger trotted into the alley after him.

Areo awoke from a stream of consciousness, of icy blue pain and crippling orange ache, of fiery red anger and violet rivers of sorrow, green fogs of relief. He was in a kaleidoscope of senses, and when he opened his eyes he was nearly blinded by the assault. Light, thoughts and energy pulsed around him. His head instantly began to ache, and he closed his eyes again.

“Careful now,” He heard a voice say. “Being dead is something to be taken with care.” Areo’s pain strangled thoughts filed this under “suspicious” before he opened his eyes again. The world seemed to stagger, and then rotated around him in a sickening whirl.

Confessions from Surreality

Confessions from Surreality

I am the greatest writer the world has ever known.

Now that I am old, I no longer care about what other people think, or what may seem to be correct behavior. I ignore protocol. I find it useless and demeaning for a writer of my stature and a man of my age to bother with the please and thank you and how-do-you-do. I have grown tired of the social lies and cultural pleasantries that blind and numb us from the truth, so I discarded them. So in this memoir, I will dispense with the little modesties and small lies, and just tell it to you unvarnished: the good and the bad, the white and the black, the diamond and the coal.

I am the greatest writer the world has ever known.

I found one of my novels the other day, hidden away in a secondhand shop, the cover ruined with water and the pages mottled with age. It was one of my smash hits from antiquity, a slim novel I titled La Forza e il Falco. Don’t be fooled by the title, it was in English. A novel on two Italian Renaissance assassins working for separate factions, it was quite popular, even was optioned for a motion picture release. Nothing happened, but it was only fifteen years ago. Times change.

I took the book up to the desk and set it onto the counter. The clerk was an emo-girl, pretty enough, but into her pinks and blacks and chrome enough that she had turned herself into a freak. She glanced and the book, snapped her gum and said “A dollar twenty-nine.”

“Wow!” I exclaimed, the perfect delusional old man, “Only that! This book is one of the greatest works of fiction ever written, and here I find it, only a dollar twenty-nine.”

She took a second, closer look at the book.

“Oh, yeah. That book.” She sounded dismissive. “I started it.”

“How was it?”

“Booor-ing.” She said. “I thought it was kind of stupid how the girl dies in the very beginning, and then that guy Panda-rot or something acts like an idiot over his niece.”

“Pavarotti was a patrician, and they were allowed to marry close relatives.”

“Whatever. It was dumb.”

I paid for the book, and then let my hand with the change hover over the mason jar labeled, “Tip’s”. Then, with a sigh, I dumped the change in my pocket.

The little philistine.

I don’t know why I bought the book. I have a shelf full of the leather-bound, gold embossed copies of my works, in my library. I think that I bought it because it was a symbol. That I used to be the best. That I wasn’t anymore. I laid it on my nightstand, the warped landscape of the pages creating a little network of miniscule caverns between it and the mahogany tabletop.

I remember when I was once the greatest writer in America, no, the English speaking world. I had critics that would do anything I asked. I could have had my cat walk across the keyboard for thirty hours and have them praise it as genius.

Those days have gone.

Never grow old. There’s nothing to look forward to.

I take it back. You are freely allowed to be senile. Forget things, insult personages, be a grouch. Not that people are required to like you.

I don’t know why I did it.

I went back to the secondhand store, gathered all of the copies of my books together that I could find, plopped them down at a table and picked up a fountain pen.

It was almost a joke, a masquerade; a comedy so obscure that even I only half got it. The emo-girl was working again. She glanced at me when I first came in the door, but she was too wrapped up in her phone to pay attention to some idiot customer.

I signed four books. My looping, beautiful signature, one that I had practiced for so long, scrolling across the yellowed pulp paper. Two were to older ladies who had heard of me (they thought) and so bought my books. The money didn’t go to me, I just signed it, but still, it was satisfying. The third went to a young college student who was taking a modern literature course, intrigued that he found me signing books. The fourth, surprisingly, went to the clerk. She looked slightly sheepish when she asked me to sign it, and I almost felt bad that I had baited her yesterday.

Serenity Amber

Apollo looked up as the gate to his cell crashed open. A hard faced man wearing the traditional maroon and grey of a guard gestured. Apollo rose and followed as the guard silently led him through the guts of Aenkarres.

Aenkarres was the largest prison in the Northern Creed, the massive country formed by North and South America after the Forest Wars. Housing the most violent offenders, each of the eleven blocks was filled with the worst of the worst, over fifteen thousand prisoners in all. Apollo really didn’t know what he was doing there, to be honest.

“Apollo Brendan?” The orderly asked.

“If you weren’t sure it was me,” Apollo asked, “Why did you get me?” The orderly ignored his comment.

“Go in.”

The guard had left, so Apollo pushed the slab-like door open, stepping into the office.

“Sit.” The man behind the desk ordered. The chairs were hard, cold and metal. “I know you haven’t a clue why I called you in here.” Apollo looked at the desk. Sloppy, stained papers were strewn about, a holo of a smiling family floated lazily above a wash of cigarette ash. The name burned into the front of the desk said “Callen Morento, sector supervisor”.

“Why, sir?” Apollo asked, wearily. Morento looked at him for a moment.

“You’ve heard of Serenity Amber?”

“I live in pit six, sir.” Apollo bit out. “The last thing I heard were the gates closing.”

“Good point.” Morento seemed nervous. Apollo didn’t know why, there were plasma autoturrets tracking him from the corners of the room. Apollo would have boiling holes in his body before he could get over the desk.

“Serenity Amber, the sixth planet in the Avian Nebula has been found to have earth like qualities. This is good, bad, and ugly. The Northern Creed wants the planet for us, you see, because it was our scientists that discovered it. Our allies, Fenwick Tundrans are the only Creed to have the technology to reach the Nebula, but last week it was discovered that Creed Orient has the same technology, salvaged from a crashed Tundran vessel.”

“How does this pertain to my life in this hellhole?” Apollo sighed. “You creeds have been on about this kind of stuff for ages.”

“Ah, that’s the trick, isn’t it? Well, the Northern Creed needs soldiers, badly. Starliners have already shipped hundreds of thousands of NC soldiers over to Serenity Amber, but we need more. And since the draft was abolished in back in ’fifty six…”

“The prettyboys won’t fight, so you are going to send the slime of society to fight the other Creeds for an unpolluted planet. Sounds fine, but why are you telling me personally? Make a blasted announcement. You gonna do this for every prisoner in here?”

“Can I discuss your case, Apollo?”

“Do so.” Apollo said. He crossed his arms.

“Why are you here?”

“I killed two peace officers, eleven soldiers and three jerks.”

“Yes. But what is remarkable is that you did it with so little. They had accelerators and armor, you had a six foot titanium pole and a boxcutter. You kicked one of them through a wall. A brick wall.”

Just like that, the glass wall in Apollo’s head crashed open, and the memories came flooding back. Memories that he had done his best to suppress, crush, forget.

It had been an icy November day. He was only nineteen. Leah was seventeen, pretty as the dawn; long, dark lashes setting off her creamy skin and sparkling green eyes, radiant when she laughed. He had been nervously fumbling with the velvet box in his overcoat pocket, cold fingers opening and closing the cream colored lid with a tiny click. They were walking from the coffee shop when he remembered his satchel, left on their table. He told her to wait at the construction site next door while he went and retrieved it.

He remembered the moment crisply, sharply, painfully. As the door tinkled shut behind him, one of the young bravos had Leah by the waist and was dragging at her white leather coat. The other had torn her hat off, and the third was laughing as he pulled rope from his pocket.

It was a sudden and quiet insanity that exploded in Apollo as he dropped his satchel. The pole leaning against the wall was in his hand a moment later, whipping through the air with incredible speed. Dark red blood spurted along its length as he wrecked the first youth’s head, the butt end destroying the second’s throat with a wet crunch. They fell, one screaming silently, one ragdolled, as the third wrapped the rope about Leah’s perfect throat, pulling tight.

“Any closer, man, and she’s dead.” Apollo had leaped forward, tearing the rope from the thug’s grasp with a furious jerk. He dropped the pole as Leah fell, catching her, before kicking the thug in the knees. The bone split with a snap, and the kid fell, shrieking. The pole wrecked his face a moment later.

The two peace officers on the corner didn’t care who attacked first: Apollo was a coratti, a second class citizen due to birth. The three boys were the children of the rich, and because of those two facts, when they saw a coratti attacking the three, they opened fire on both Leah and Apollo. Apollo was shot through the side, but Leah was hit six times. Before the two officers could reload, the pole had ruined their bodies and stolen their souls.

Apollo held Leah as she died, her blood staining the coat and his arms, his tears dropping onto her face and freezing.

And with that, Apollo’s soul died too.

Out of the nineteen soldiers that blocked the ends of the street moments later, only eight survived.

Leah went to heaven, the dead went to Hell, and Apollo went to Aenkarres.

The East Wind Hotel

Anderson Cobbs was an excitable man, who owned a hotel that exploded.

Well, not often.

He fancied himself a junior alchemist, though he had barely made it past the second semester in the local Underground University, called the “W”. He had a hotel with a hundred rooms, a basement filled with alchemical qualities and elements, very few guests, and no sense. He was lamenting the fourth sad, but reasonably lucky, fact to one of his friends (of two) one day.

“I’ll tell you, Harv, this is getting supremely disappointing.” He was sitting behind the somewhat charred, and worse for wear, clerk’s desk in the newly carpeted lobby. His friend, Harvard Balestra, was a common gunfighter, not an entrepreneur, but he was sympathetic; and besides, having someone who could pin a blackhat down at thirty paces, in a sandstorm, was a pretty good bargain, even if he did mostly grunt, spit on the wall and ride a mule. (He was too poor to buy a horse; times were hard for gunfighters.)

It was at this moment that the telephone rang, a brazen jingle of bells and clappers. Anderson picked it up.

“The East Wind hotel.” He said, eyes widening expressively at the half-asleep Harvard. Harv propped two dusty boots on the desk.

“I’m sorry, we don’t have any vacancies.” Anderson said, winking happily at Harv. Harv pulled his hat down over his eyes with one hand, settling his gun belt with the other.

“You need it? Very well, I suppose that we can cobble something up. It’ll be pretty expensive.” He waited a moment. “Thirty arias a night. Very well. How long shall you be needing this room? Two weeks?” Anderson made the yippee sign: one fist swung in tight circles by the right ear. No response from the gunfighter.

“Very well, I shall ready the room for you. Until tomorrow.” Anderson clicked the telephone down with a flourish. Then he rose and spun around the room, laughing with glee.

“Two weeks! And at twice the norm!” He seemed almost about to explode. Harvard rose in a jingle of spurs, muttered something about peace and quiet, and shuffled lazily out of the door.

The next day a rather damaged stage rolled into town. The wheels looked less than perfect, the once pretty paint scuffed by the careless fist of the desert, a few odd bulletholes peppered around the cash box. No way to tell if they were real. Sometimes the coaches would put them in just to make them look like they’d been around, seen some action.

Quite unexpectedly, and to the mild, hazed surprise of the few observers sitting on various porches, the coach stopped in front of the East Wind Hotel. An old timer watched it a moment, and then spat appreciatively at his companion’s boot.

“East Wind got a visitor.” He said, as though he had, through some superhuman feat of his own, engineered this fact.

“That so.” His companion muttered behind the brim of his hat.

“’s a girl.” He said, curious.

“That so.” His companion said again.

“A fresh little daisy.” He said, and then added “And it is so.”

Anderson was frantically picking up bits of soot blackened glass from a quite recent accident when an elegant young lady walked in the door of his hotel. Anderson was only twenty six, she looked a few years younger than that, and his heart gave a thump, as his head went Retirement!