Binary Blues

I had a quarter-tank of gas, more than enough to get me through the week. The night was cooler than it had been in weeks; finally felt a little like October. I sighed. I didn't want to get gas now, and I sure as hell won't want to get gas later. When nothing you do matters, then you are truly free. I grabbed my keys and put on my lobster sandals. 

The mutts wanted to come along, so I let them in the backseat of the car and rolled down the windows. The autoplay on the stereo connected to my phone and started playing dark jazz; the kind of music that sounds like it's punching you in the gut while it smothers you with a pillow. 

I don't remember selecting that music. 

The intersection is down to one lane, but it's late and not busy. In the orange streetlights, I see a man and a woman sitting on the sidewalk and chatting, their bags scattered around them. They seem resigned but not unhappy. It's dark and I can't be sure. There is a god of pain, I think, and they must have eluded him today. I can't be sure. It's late and dark. 

I remember the terror of uncertainty. I think I liked it. 

I tell myself that now, but I can't be sure. Whatever it is I'm doing now feels like mimicry. A pantomime of solitude. 

Moving slowly, like a shark, just fast enough to live, but not fast enough to get anywhere.

The gas station attendant is nowhere to be seen. I use the self-fill station. As I press the buttons on the keypad, it beeps at me and adds zeros and ones and zeros and ones in a repeating pattern. Some binary message, probably. But I don't know binary, so I ignore it. 

My tank is full, and my car says I can now go 500 miles, if I drive conservatively. I feel a little better. 

the pig men were becoming a real problem

The hybrids had escaped from the lab and were eating all the crops and generally wreaking havoc. They were only 33.3 percent human, to get around the 29th Amendment to the US Constitution, that had decreed a minimum threshold of 40 percent DNA of human origin was enough to grant human rights. (And yes, we know how genes work and that we share DNA with many creatures, all living things are made up of the same basic building blocks, but this specifically refers to the source, not just the sequence.). 

They were more like pig centaurs, I guess, but without a clear delineation between the pig part and the human part. Imagine a regular pig; now stretch out just the neck, up and out like a horse's, but about twice as long. More like a llama. Then give it the oval shape of a human head, but much larger, with small, deep-set eyes, a pig snout, triangular ears, and bristles poking out all over. Many of the males will grow tusks. 

And right underneath the head, jutting out from under the chin, are a pair of small arms and hands. They look like someone stuck the arms of a five-year-old kid on them as a joke. They have five fingers, but no fingernails. 

It's the most unsettling thing about them. They are mostly active at night, but sometimes during the day you can see them resting under a shade tree, eyes closed, with those little arms folded underneath. 

Or the way they drink water by dipping their whole heads just above the surface of the river or pond and the little hands will scoop up the water and they'll slurp it up. 

Once, as I stood on my porch with the sun setting behind me, I saw one shading its eyes with its hands as it crept up to the edge of my vegetable garden. 

It's hard to keep them out. With those damn hands, they can open gates and latches. Even doorknobs. 

Someone really outta do something about those pig-men.

the end? 

Not really because this was/is a draft, one of many where I start jotting stuff down, and it's not even what I would call a story because nothing happens. Describing odd stuff is not a story. There are threads there, at least. There are definitely lots of opportunities for creepy hand things. Picking their teeth. Digging. Greeting each other by touching each other's faces. Or maybe face-holding. Pigs are omnivores and will eat any meat they can get so it seems natural that eventually these pig-men will try to eat someone. We'll see. 

Need Nothing

He was trying to get to bed early tonight. He'd felt off all week, and knew that it usually meant he hadn't been getting enough sleep. He wasn't tired yet, so he put on some instrumental music and stared at the wall. Off-white, knockdown-textured drywall. He would imagine shapes in the ridges and plateaus of the paint. A skyscraper. The head of a horse. A clawed hand reaching down. 

He closed his eyes and tried to sleep. Except... He could still see the wall. He opened and closed his eyes again. Still, the wall was there. He pressed his fingertips against his closed eyelids. 

He was wondering if he was dreaming when the clawed hand he has seen in the texture of the paint began peeling itself away from the wall towards him. 

Towards his face. Towards his eyes. 

He froze in terror. 

A searing pain, and then he saw nothing. 

The End

Author's Note: This was going to be about the mental strain of not being able to close your eyes and enjoy peaceful darkness once in a while but I quickly realized that being able to see clearly at all times is kind of a superpower and would become a whole thing and I didn't want to deal with the logistics of that right now. Goodnight!

*Note to self: it's twenty minutes later but why you don't you have him only see the image of the last thing he saw clearly? That could work. 

A Time Machine

You can travel to the past, if you really want to, but no one is there anymore. It's just an empty shell, a scaffolding holding nothing up anymore. In a past life, we met for the last time and hugged until we cried. I went back, once, and saw the tear drops on the ground and our footprints in the dust. 

You can go forward, too, but nobody is there yet. You can see amazing new places, cities and mountains and towns and architecture that means nothing to you, nothing to anyone, not yet. 

If I were trying to warn you against it, I would say "Time is like a river, and you can only step into a moment once" or something quasi-profound like that. 

But I'm not going to stop you. You've already gone, and I've already gone, but we didn't go at the same time. And we missed each other again. 

And I can go as many times as I like, for as long as I like, just hoping. But time moves on without us, unwavering, resolute. It will take longer and longer to get back to the present. Until one day, when you just won't make it. 

This isn't a warning. You've already done it. You already know this. 

Because you're the one who told me this. I read the message you left, written in the dust. 

The End

Author's Note: I was thinking about a story about a werewolf but then this happened. Goodnight!

Care To Go Around Again?

Shit. I'm finishing my second glass of Macallan 12 year single malt scotch when I realize that its September 30th. Nothing special about today, except that it usually means tomorrow is October 1st. That's the day I have a problem with. 

Exactly a dozen Octobers ago, I got a doppelganger. A double, almost an exact duplicate. I don't know how it happened. I was torn, I guess, wanting to be in two places at once. Then, I was. Staring directly at myself, like looking into a mirror. I had attacked him immediately. He had hesitated, I remember, which makes me suspect that even then, we weren't exactly the same. 

Other Me got in a lucky kick to my knee and I fell, and he ran. 

Haven't seen him since. 

But I know that he's still out there. I also know, somehow, that I'm completely safe for eleven months out of the year, but every October, for those 31 days, he gets a chance to destroy me. 

It's been so long now, and I haven't seen him at all. 

I stretch half-heartedly. I've been exercising, mostly. Partly. I'm ready for another physical fight anyway. My knee still bothers me, but I've got a brace for it. 

It's getting late, and I'm drowsy. He wouldn't attack right at midnight. That is, we wouldn't. It's too obvious. Plus, the dogs would bark. The dogs are the reason I don't just put booby traps all over the place. Also because, statistically, your booby traps are more likely to harm you than the actual intruder. Most major accidents happen in the home anyway. 

I hope we get to talk a little before we do battle. I have so many questions. Presumably, we have now had the chance to learn from double the amount of mistakes, so why not share that hard-earned wisdom with whoever wins? 

Whomever wins?

I'll also have to thank him, I suppose. These 13 years have been a lot of things, including a huge pain in my ass, but they haven't been boring. 

And I've got a good feeling about this October. 

The End? 

Well it begins. I'm going to attempt to write something fictional and spooky (or at least autobiographical and horror-adjacent) every day this month. Since I don't do NaNoWriMo. This one isn't that. Spooky, I mean. This isn't really writing; this is merely swirling the water a bit, as they say. 

I don't know, I don't like doppelgangers. We might be friends and I guess clothes shopping would be fun because we could share a closet. Still, imagine the pointless arguments. Everyone around us would probably kill us first. 

Goodnight!

The Oldest Story

A ringing bell, elsewhere in the house. Never seems to be at the same time of day. Or night. I've chased it deeper and deeper. 

Some music has lyrics we don't understand until it's too late. 

I don't have time for that kind of music. 

who took the sun

This is a draft, I think. Some story idea, or a fragment of something already written,  temporarily separated from the pack. 

Through the haze comes enough light for lichen and moss. The whole world in the crepuscular zone. Everywhere though, there is no nightfall. 

How

The only way for that to work... The world would have to be a hollow sphere around a star, like a Dyson sphere. Would that work? With gravity and all that, because the star would pull them toward the center. The sphere could spin. But no, it wouldn't be uniform. Centrifugal force acting as gravity would push everything to the "equator", I think, so a person walking towards the north or south "poles" would start to get pulled backwards, headfirst. 

I think. 

I'm at the point where I'm not sure I know what I'm imagining. 

No wonder these types of stories always have some kind of artificial gravity generator. Who needs physics when you've for science magic.