ell you know my name is, he started, but he didn’t know what came next. Simon, the nurse said. Nice to meet you, he said. No, she said, That’s your name you old fart. It didn’t sound familiar to him, but who was he to argue. He reached into the pocket of his bathrobe and pulled out a fistful of busted chalk. Give me that, the nurse said, and left him with nothing. Well. There were only whiteboards now anyway. Nothing to draw on. No way to leave an impression. He took off his glasses and closed his eyes and imagined the darkness was just one long scroll of blackboard. He could draw anything on it. Only he didn’t know what. So he drew nothing and rolled the scroll back up tight instead. Someone was tugging at his robe. He opened his eyes. A little boy, a brat. Somebody’s grandchild in for a visit. Somebody looking apologetically his way, pulling the little boy off. He turned to look out the window at the old garden wall. The wood was falling to rot, but there was a workman out there on a ladder slopping white paint on it. As if that layer of skin could hold back the years. What are you doing staring at that old thing, the nurse said, There’s nothing over it but a junkyard. I’m hot, he said. You’re nothing of the kind, she said. But she still jammed a mop handle under the door to prop it open. When she focused her torment on someone else, he snuck out into the lane. The workman was doing a piss poor job of it. What’s on the other side, he said, and the workman said, Nothing but an old junkyard. And he continued on with his piss poor job. Then he said, I need to piss, and went inside. There were eleven steps, each one an odyssey. The ladder creaked and so did his bones. When he reached the top, he wasn’t tall enough to see over. He grabbed the top boards, his hands sticking to the paint, and stretched. What can you see, a voice said. He looked back down. The brat, the little boy, was there at the bottom of the ladder. Nothing, he said. Oh, the little boy said. He kicked at the weeds in between the flagstones. It wouldn’t be long before he would be tall enough to look over his own garden walls at all the junkyards of the world. Not nothing, he said, turning back again. And then the blackboard scroll inside him unrolled, roaring with colour and laughter and magic. All of everything. Dipping his tongue into the words and painting. And the little boy listened, letting the pictures take him, take him over.
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o one accused him of being the world’s best father. His kids had been in and out of therapy for years. He’d used them for his own experiments, it was true. And he’d almost eaten his son in a spoonful of cereal. But not on purpose. It didn't matter that he tried his best. He always made the child support payments on time. They wouldn’t speak to him anymore. He left messages. He kept scrapbooks, meticulously filed, bragged about every one of their accomplishments to the neighbours. When they’d listen. The university had pulled the funding years ago. It was a forced retirement. He’d expected, like from out of one of those old B movies, that some general would show up on his lawn in a Sherman tank and demand the plans for his machines. They’d blast the shrinking ray at whatever nation had the most oil, or make 50-foot soldiers. But it never happened. It was always easier to blow things up the old fashioned way. All he cared about were his children. He thought, if I could only invent something to make them happy. Protect them from pain. He rehearsed the line, You were my greatest inventions, over and over, but he never got to use it. He still spent most days and nights in the attic, toiling away. Tinkering. Building up, breaking down, rebuilding. Every day was a new kind of ruin. magine a castle. The kind your parents saw in squeaky spring cinemas that could only play one film at a time. The kind of castle Christopher Lee could brood around in. Imagine barbicans and battlements, towers and turrets, bodies swaying in gibbets. That kind of castle. Not a friendly place. Why are you here, so early in the morning? As if in answer, the drawbridge lowers. Down comes powdered rust like snow. Someone must have gone in the back to open it. Graffiti has been splashed across the two wooden doors, made illegible with time. The doors yawn darkly inward. You think about turning around. Any sane person would. But a distant sound draws you forward. The jolly lilt of a flute. Imagine ceilings too high for any ladder, windows only a giraffe could reach. You feel small and insignificant, as you always do, only more so. And there in the middle of the floor: a mountain. Not a mountain, a boot. You circumnavigate the toe. Imagine the herd of cows that would need slaughtering, the hide stretching and drying and tanning and stitching, to make a boot of this size. Imagine the foot that slips inside it, causing earthquakes with each step. Imagine the ankle, the calf, the knee and up, way up, to the head like a small planet looking down at you. A hand closing around you, bringing you closer to an abyss of teeth like whitened tombstones. Flesh and bone ground to a fine red paste. Imagine all that. But instead all you find is a half circle of three chairs pulled up in front of a fireplace, the fire long since cold. A man, with his back to you, rocking. Just a man, not a giant. White hair, sagging skin. Rocking, rocking. Of his own accord or just the slow dying force of a pendulum, it’s impossible to tell. A wood recorder lies on the floor next to the chair. Imagine the song you could play with that. Sweet, sad. Friendly. eep in the miserable ruins outside Caledon, three figures in purple robes gather around a fire. The wood, like them, is rotten and gives little light and less warmth. A bird pirouettes on a spit, green feathers piled nearby. They are all cold and lacking in animation. One of them has a beard, one wears a helmet and one is a woman. Other than that, they are indistinguishable. They speak with one voice. They’ve long since given up on money, glory and power. World domination. Now they just have the simple dream of the downtrodden: that tomorrow will be a little better, bring a little more than yesterday. Just enough to scratch some kind of lasting imprint on the world. Leave something behind them when they go. The man in the helmet claims to be invincible, and so have they all felt once. But their robes are frayed, the deep plum fading to mulberry. The bird won’t feed them all, but it will keep them going. The end might never come. But even now, from the trees there’s a toot-toot-twee! The piping of some mad flautist. The pattering of hooves. Someone shrieks in a high pitched voice: Suffering psyche! I found them, I found them! Soon he’ll be there, barely clothed. Down from the mountain with hades to pay. He’ll let them smack him around for a while. Allow them this fleeting taste of victory, before snatching it away. Then on with the ring and the crash of lightning. He’ll grab a handful of purple robes and drag one of them off, back up the mountain. Screaming. The other two will wait their turn. They’ll eat the bird. The whole thing will take less than five minutes. e limps between the tombstones, the few not crumbling or knocked over by teens. He isn’t as tall as he used to be. That’s what age does to you. Curves the spine, rounds the joints, shaves off inches and memory. Makes you somebody else. He keeps to himself these days. The dwarves organized on him, started insisting on being called Little People and demanded new robes. Cotton instead of the burlap he’d been buying in bulk. Too itchy, they said. So he just stopped making minions altogether. He’d let the spheres rust, too. He couldn’t afford to fix the humidifier to keep the old place dry. Mausoleums cost a fortune to heat. He’s taken to snowbirding. At the first sign of frost, he’s off to the red dimension. He doesn’t come back until the asphalt shimmers. He has to take tests every year to keep the hearse on the road. The fat man from the DMV always sweating all over the leather, he’s almost happy when they come to blow it up now, so he can get a new one. And come they will. They always find him, eventually. There were only so many funeral homes, tombs and graveyards he could hide in these days. Back inside, he lays the brochures out on his desk. Maybe he could get a part-time job at the hardware store in town. Just enough to put a down payment on a condominium, in one of these seniors' places. Retirement home. It has a nice ring to it. But first, there’s sod to lay, floors to polish, brains to obtain. There’s never enough time. Today is quiet, sure. But tomorrow, or next week, one day soon they’ll come roaring up in that Barracuda, tearing up his grass. The boy and the ice cream man. Going on thirty years, but they just won’t give up. The irony doesn’t escape him. He’s short and the boy’s old enough to start collecting a pension. They’ll make a mess of the place. Whooping and hollering and firing off that four-barreled shotgun. He’s so tired of dying, he just wants to rest. ook—the moon. A small bowl brimming with cream. Listen—can you hear it? A piano, the keys softly walked. Stars rippling across the sky in time. Pull back. A sleeping, steepled town. Further. The street winding empty like it seldom does these days. Further. The buildings huddle close, the trees closer still. A handful of lights behind shuttered windows, like glowworms in cocoons. Listen—a viola slides in, easing us…off…to…sleep. But look—up there. Over the hedge. The high window of the nearest rowhouse. Push back the branch of the gnarled chestnut. That dappled glow. But before you can reach it, the light snaps off. The music hushes. Get a little closer. Closer still, hands and nose pressed coldly to windowpane. A captain’s bed. Sheets drawn tight like a death shroud over the sleeping form. Breath gusting through the empty chambers of his body. Let him sleep. But he’s just been pretending. Waiting for the wadded comfort of night to settle over us like cotton batting. A plumed head emerges from under the bed. A sheepdog, a torch clamped firmly in its mouth. The boy slides from the bed, taking the torch. Offering received. They pause, like this, in anticipation. The music hangs. The arms of some great scale sway drunkenly above us. The torch winks on. A splash of light, a circle on carpet. It glitters, like the barely remembered stars from long ago, outside. A portal. It seems to beckon. One step and we’ll be falling, straight through the floor, sliding helter skelter round and round, down and down, exploding into a world of colour and light. Old friends, new adventures. But listen—there’s no music. Just a siren in the distance. And look—in the harsh glow of the flashlight, you see it’s not a sheepdog. Just a mutt. Not a boy, a man, bent with age and disappointment. They’ve been looking for intruders. Not adventure. This is a bad neighbourhood, after all. They play the light of the torch across the wall. Shadows like slow monsters. Duck—before you’re seen. Back over the hedge, out of the light. Up and down the streets, fumbling for something, someone you might recognize. rom the tower, he watches their approach. Two meaningless black specks. He’s been alone for so long. Nothing but the echoes of ghosts to keep him company. He reaches down inside, blindly fumbling around the pit of his stomach. And there it is. Still, after all these years. A hot marble. Anger. It rises from his belly, like bile or hot coals, rattling up his ribcage, clawing up his throat, filling his mouth, his nasal passages, running through his antlers like an electrical current, and finally, boiling down into his nose. They walk. They walk some more. They walk and walk and walk. And they stop. “How far have we come?” asks the Dentist. “A ways,” answers the Prospector. “How far to go?” “A ways away.” And then they stop stopping to walk. And they walk some more. As they walk, they sink. Deeper with each step. The temperature is rising, vapour wafting off the snow, clinging to them in grey strands. It’s like pressing through television static. They sink and the snow begins to tower over them on either side, slush sucking at their feet. A red light burns through the mist ahead of them. The air clears, pulling back like curtains to show walls and gabled roofs, gaping windows, a turret with a red light glowing in its window. A castle cut from the ice. It had been magnificent, full of colour and light. Now, streams of water run down the eaves, as the whole thing sinks. The two travelers stands in its shadow. High above them, the red light in the turret goes out. They climb the stairs. The Dentist can’t reach the knocker, so his old friend boosts him, grunting with the effort. “You got fat.” “You got old.” “Doesn’t everything.” Boom, boom, boom. The sound echoes through the structure. It takes minutes to fade, but no one comes. The Prospector leans against the doors, and they swing inwards, drooping on their hinges. As they enter the yawning halls, there’s the whiff of gingerbread and nutmeg. Then the rush of mold underneath. Tinkers and tailors, whittlers and cobblers: the place should be a buzzing hive as the crafters make the last push before the big day. But the workbenches sit empty, stools overturned. Holly and ivy hang like corpses from the rafters. Their footsteps echo, the Prospector loping and the Dentist scurrying to keep up. They pass one hall after the other, a straight line like a throat, heading deeper and deeper toward the belly of the place. They finally reach the end. A little light from the window hits a chair in the centre of the room. A throne. Built from antlers. The Dentist counts: One, two, three… A red glow lights up the rest of the scene. The Dentist sees more: Four, five, six, seven… The Reindeer is seated on the throne. Sprawled unnaturally, like a man. His nose glows red. A darker, more crimson red than they remember. Eight, the Dentist finishes. Eight pairs of antlers. The Reindeer slides from the throne and finds his hooves. The shreds of a blue vest hangs from his shoulders: the remnants of the Walmart takeover. He paces a wide circle around the others, as they spread out to meet him. The Prospector spins his pickaxe, the metal glinting in the half-light. The Reindeer paws the ground and snorts. The Dentist tries to remember anything from the Brazilian jujitsu class he took last year in Tarzana. Everything goes still and silent like a thread pulled tight. The Reindeer’s nose glows brighter than ever. A supernova. It lights up all their faces. The lines and scars. They’re not friends anymore, thinks the Dentist. Friends are people who spend time together. Who know each other. Who can hurt you the most, but don’t. But these are not my enemies, thinks the Reindeer. Their only enemy is time. The time that was stolen. The time they’ve wasted. Another year, thinks the Prospector. Another year almost gone. The red light in the room fades. The Reindeer’s nose dies out to black and he drops his head. The Prospector lets his pickaxe fall to the floor. The Dentist relaxes his stance. “I want to go back,” he says. But no one is listening. The others sit on the floor, dejected. The Dentist reaches into his parka and brings out the wad of papers. He crumples them up and lights them with a pack of matches. The flames curl the ends of the paper: “Agreement for the sale of Christmas T…” The final word already burned away. As he searches for scraps of wood to pile on top, his foot hits something. He leans down and picks up a wooden soldier. Only half-carved. He finds his scalpel and gets to whittling. It comes out cleanly and quickly from the wood. Old habits. He makes the lines softer and cuts out the rifle. “What’re you doing?” The Prospector leans over him. “Making a gift.” He carves a smile onto the face. Something kind. “For who?” He doesn’t answer, because he doesn’t know yet. There are other wooden blocks scattered across the floor. So much left to carve. The Prospector goes to the cupboard and pulls out the old things. He gets dressed. Fur pants and suspenders, red wool and wooden buttons. He sits on the throne to pull on the black boots. The Reindeer returns, dragging the sleigh out of storage. The Prospector eases him into the harness, gently placing the bridle between his teeth. The Dentist runs his hand along the tarnished brass rail where the reins are still looped. The oak boards have been eaten by rot and worms. It would fall apart, tomorrow or next year. But for now it would hold together. he roar of the rotor fills him, like the slow, sick revolution of his soul. His body’s numb. Not from the cold but from skipping across the world like a small stone. Skip from west coast to east, skip over the Atlantic to London, skip on to Oslo, skip to Svalbard, skip skip skipping nowhere, to the very edge of the map. He rubs the frost from the window and peers down. Water and ice and something else: the dark hulking forms of the rigs anchored off the coast. He’d left a heatwave in L.A. and already heat was part of his past, like innocence and good cheer. For the past three days, they’ve been stuck at the ice station waiting for the storm to clear, crouched by the radio, drinking schnapps and eating from cold cans of spaghettios. This morning he’d been ripped from his tent by the pilot and stuffed in the helicopter, both of them still drunk from the night before. The pilot shouts something at him in Norwegian. Too much to hope for a crash: sudden heat and fiery end. The helicopter descends toward a bald white expanse. Below a figure waves them down. He feels inside his parka to make sure the papers are still there. Four sheets versus several thousand miles. The pilot is shouting at him again. He doesn’t understand. He doesn’t understand anything. But as he leans closer, the pilot reaches past him, swinging the door open and shoving him hard into empty space. It’s maybe eight feet, but it feels like Alice’s rabbit hole. Tumbling through cold, smelling cold, tasting it, the cold sinking into his pores, down into his soul. He never thought he’d come back. But here he is. He opens his eyes to see the Prospector towering over him. Hs fiery beard and moustache so white with age, or frost, he almost looks like his old boss. He opens his mouth to say something but the wind is howling, the storm closing in again with shards of ice blowing in from the sea. The Prospector pulls him to his feet and they stumble toward a mound of snow. A dark hole is cut into it. A cave. They fall through the opening together, into darkness. The floor is sticky. It’s warm. Hot, even. The feeling creeps back into his body. He rolls onto his back, the Prospector beside him. His chest burns. He can’t catch his breath. The Prospector pokes him in his side. “You got fat.” “You got skinny.” He pokes back. “It goes both ways.” “What does?” “Getting old.” They lie in silence for a while, like old friends or people who used to know each other. “You bring it?” He pulls out the papers. He can’t read anything in the dark, but he remembers the gist. “Seven figures.” “It’s worth more.” “That’s what they’re offering. It’s good money. Silver and gold, right?” “I don’t want it.” He remembers the message. Was it only last week? The satellite service and lag so bad he could hardly recognize the voice. “You asked me for help. You told me to organize a sale.” “I changed my mind.” “I came seven thousand kilometers! I cancelled patients!” His shouts don’t echo. The cave just eats up the sound. “Where the hell are we?” “Someplace warm.” A smell reaches him. A stink. He pulls off a glove and touches the floor. Sticky and hot. He staggers to his feet and pushes back through the opening. The ice has turned into a steady snowfall, but the wind’s died down. He sees the red slash of the cave opening. The snow stained in front of it, the blood already freezing black. He brushes some of the snow on the mound away, showing the white fur of his old friend. He reaches into his parka and touches the large tooth hung from a strap around his neck. His first patient. The Prospector stands beside him. “I still need your help.” “With what?” The Prospector doesn't answer. He tugs his toque down low over his eyes and pulls his pick out of the ice. He turns and walks off into the wastes. He doesn’t look back. He doesn’t have to. They both know the way home. othing. He licks the edge of the pickaxe again. Still nothing. He brushes the snow off and gets back to his feet. Takes his time because it takes longer now. Even as the days dry up like raisins toward the end of the year, everything takes longer. And it hurts. Standing, walking, existing. It all hurts. He stamps his feet to get the blood moving, then grabs the chain and gives it a yank. The toothless beast at the other end moans, but with another hard pull it finally lumbers to its feet, breathing hard. The coast is only a short march now. Stagger is more like it. He misses the dogs, but they’d needed to eat. One by one, and then they’d burned the sled for firewood. They haven’t been warm since. The wind is picking up, blowing snow, his breath forming crystals in his moustache and beard. He’ll have to be careful. Not stop again. Not for the frostbite. He’s had so much of that his skin is like rawhide, but he has to watch out for chasms. The ice is cracking up more and more, chunks drifting off. Soon there’ll be nothing left. He promised to be at the landing by sundown. Sundown being a relative term having nothing to do with light and dark. Everything is black as coal, as pitch. Blacker even. Has been for weeks, would be for weeks more. But a few dozen steps are all he can manage. He drops the chain and the beast behind him settles gratefully to the ground with a thump and a groan. Out of habit or hope, he tosses his pickaxe in the air and lets it fall, point first in the ice. Maybe this time. He jerks it out and licks the edge. Still nothing. No whiff of menthol to tell him Dig, dig here. He gives the chain a yank. Then another. Then another. But it doesn’t move. It lies there: a giant mound of white fur. He keeps yanking, but it’s just another useless motion. Like breathing. He lets the chain go. It’s hard to tell the fur from all the snow around it. Already it’s been covered up. Once, it had been so wild and feared. Then he broke and tamed it. Now, it’s just another lump. He turns back. The journey has to go on. You can’t stop it. Like the year, hurtling toward an end. As it went on after the peppermint mine played out, and the elves went on strike, and Walmart bought the whole operation up and then shut it down. You just have to put one foot in front of the other. But underneath his feet, there’s a crunching and snapping. Like the bones of a giant. He falls back on his ass, lines spidering out through the ice, water leaping up through the cracks. He digs in with his cleats, pushing himself back from the edge. He’s reached the coast. Then, a bubble of light shows through the blowing snow. For a minute he thinks, This is it. A red light in the sky. Blinking. He almost shouts. Wahoo. He almost believes. Things won’t have to change. They’ll reverse. His friends will undie. The water will refreeze. The drills will rise and the oil rigs will retreat. But then there’s the slow, spinning sound of rotors above him to tell him there's no magic. It just goes on. Life. The helicopter descends. It’s relentless. He sticks the pickaxe in the ice to show them where to land. He buries it deep so it can’t be pulled up. Then he rubs his hands together and blows into them. He just needs a little feeling in his fingers so he can work a pen. So he can sign the contract. e’d slimmed out. Stopped eating junk food. He ran every morning. He got a degree, and then another one. He found a job. Not one he loved, but he made decent money and the holidays were nice. He married someone who saw the good in him and treated him well. They were talking about having a kid. Maybe two. His parents were proud of him. People liked him. He was loved by the few that matter. But still, sometimes a stranger, walking by him on a street, would stop, turn back and watch him go. They’d shake their head. He could be beautiful, they’d think, if he’d just stop eating chocolate bars. |
8bitmythsRemember when you were a minipop, and you saw that film, you know, the one you loved that never had a sequel? Well, let's say it did. And it was just like you imagined it, only a little bit worse.
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