pride

Can the animal be proud, with its horns removed, and with all of its hair shorn? Its priestly beard is gone. It lets out a great moan, and then its vocal cords are cut. This animal is kept in the town square. Children and passersby smear it with feces and pelt it with rotten foodstuffs. The visiting traveler is disgusted by this and steals the animal, intending to set it free. But when he takes it back to its herd they reject it. He kills the animal out of mercy. The villagers track him down and give him the same treatment they gave the animal. They install him in its place in the town square.

mewling

Sandy was necking with her boyfriend during the telelecture on caring for the animal wetnurses. Now she wished she had cribbed her friend’s notes. If you didn’t shampoo the sow’s teats the little ones faces would get chafed, then they would bleed and get infected. Once that happened the managers would ‘cull’ them was one of the words they used, or ‘dispose of.’ Then they would harangue her about the cost to the insurance company to replace those little ones and the raise in insurance rates for those who had provisioned them.

During her pre-med studies Sandy was spending time as an intern at a facility that grew tissue replacement organisms. The organisms were based on human DNA, but you handled it better if you didn’t think of them as human. They were engineered to have only enough brain for autonomous response.

Dandy discovered that she was pregnant from her spring semester romance. Since the facility was in fairly remote farmland and she was not closely supervised, she managed to keep it a secret, and she replaced one of the little ones with her own baby.

stepsister

A young girl of about twelve digs through her mother’s closet and she finds a photo album, which also doubles as a scrap book. That is what her mother has left of her stepsister, who was killed in a car accident in high school. Intrigued by the idea that her mother had a stepsister, and a stepdad, the girl does more digging and winds up taking the bus to a retirement community to pay a visit to her mother’s stepfather’s ex-wife. She brings back more photos of the dead step sister and show them to her mom. Her mom’s reactions are complicated, but the girl seems to understand them well, to her mother’s surprise.

pelt

Hiking back from the lake he had come upon two wolves – one was sodomizing the other and biting its neck. The next day hiking to the lake he came upon the corpse of the submissive wolf. He looked at it briefly but left it there. He muttered to himself something about taking the pelt. At the end of the day, on his way back again, he stopped and thought about it some more. He went home to get a plastic tarp and rubber gloves. He already had his field knife. He field-dressed the wolf before wrapping the carcass and dragging it home. As he put his hands through the cut into the body he couldn’t help but feel that he was sodomizing the wolf again and had a queasy flash superimposing himself on the dominating wolf.

deprogrammed

I sit in what I think of as my dirty little hovel, claustrophobic and underground for being on the moon of a gas giant. I have been deprogrammed, my comrades say. I no longer believe what I believed when I lived in the consumer society of the station in the gas giant’s Lagrangian point. I ponder whether I am deprogrammed or simply reprogrammed. A point of semantics, my new companions say. I have my doubts, but my companions tell me that doubt is exactly the gift that I have been given – it is what was kept from me by the crass and superficial station society. “But somehow from within that society I chose this life – how?” I ask.

“Yes,” they say, “You had, amazingly, enough of a glimpse of the truth to want more.” I still spend most of my time wondering if I agree. But that doesn’t mean I’m not happy, or at least satisfied.

New recruits or converts start appearing in large numbers – soon it becomes apparent that migration into the self-exile of this colony has become a fad on the station.

smoke show

The anticipation as he walked toward the exhibition hall made him almost dizzy. He couldn’t believe he was getting paid to attend the smoke trade show. As he walked around the show he came uopn an exhibit manned by a young woman in a summer dress, who stood next to a glass box in which roiled wisps of orange. She invited him to stick his hand in. Tendrils of the orange smoke coiled up his forearm, and he instinctively pulled his arm back. The smoke stayed curled around his wrist, and he could somehow feel affection from it. “It’s acts like a pet,” smiled the woman as she extended her hand to his, and the smoke moved to her arm, which she then held over the tank to let it rejoin the rest.

leaves

Bob and Pete got jobs at a spa where the specialty is massage with a sponge made of braided leaves from a plant that secrets a sap reportedly good for the skin. They were assigned to retie the loose leaves on used sponges. They spent all day in a back room, tying vegetable leaves together. One of the spa quests wondered back and found them there. “What the hell are you guys doing back here? Listen this is a stupid job. Why don’t you guys help me out. I’ll give you work at my factory – should be right up your alley: wrapping cigars.” The pay is a lot better, so they left to work at the cigar factory, and found that their main task was to bust unions. One of them took to it, the other didn’t like it.

body line

The body line went through the center of town. A mountain town wakes up one morning to find a wall going down the center of the main street. It looks like its made of people in some way, or rather made of one person, or multiple copies of one person. they build bridges over it. you can go through it, but its generally not recommended. it’s a thoroughly disorienting experience. Years later, a small religious movement has formed around this line, and a prophet announces that he has been called to bring this person back to the world, to collapse the wave function.

inspired by a mis-heard lyric from dylan’s isis, “the borderline went through the center of town” and world lines as depicted in donnie darko.

night sky

I was thinking of th starry night sky and how wondrous it is. Every time you look at it there is something new to see, something new to understand. So beautiful. I am awestruck. But it wasn’t the nght sky. It was your face I was thinking of.

and here’s his horse

A young man native to a colony is on homestay to its mother country. his host family takes him to a local museum. one of the displays is horse of the missionary who proselytized the young man’s country, mummified and sent back to his homeland as a gift, in reverence. he doesn’t feel comfortable correcting for his host family – that the horse, an animal that had never been seen in that land, was killed out of disgusted wonderment the pickled and sent back in insult by the obstinate pagans who were eventually supplanted.