A Spell

this is important.

Daily Mirror, London, March 9, 1939

Mastodon Droppings

I post very very short stories to Mastadon— my handle is @david_pasquinelli. Below are five of them. Enjoy.

Garbage Disposal

I pulled out a handful of noodles and egg shells from my garbage disposal. The water drained, but there was more. Fishing around, I pulled out: several chicken livers, which I couldn’t account for; a clump of moss the size of my fist; a dozen rotten plums that smelled awful; and, most disturbingly, clumps of red hair and teeth. I shined a light down the drain and saw a glint of gold, but when I reached in to grab it I cut myself. After bandaging my hand I looked again, but it was gone.

The Majors

I dreamt of playing Major League Baseball as far back as I can remember. I loved the game, but I loved the dream more. It was my treasure, my dream of making it to the majors. Through Little League, Babe Ruth League, high-school ball, and the minors, that dream was my best loved, most precious possession. I leaned on it when times were hard. I thought I had gone to heaven when I finally got called up. But now the dream is gone. Now it’s a job, and what do I have to lean on?

Poorly Done

He brought the muzzle of the revolver to his eye and, like the others, fired it. Just like that, there was a hole where his eye had been. But he’d done a bad job and made a mess of it. He writhed and screamed on the floor before—pop—he put out the other eye. Then he lay silent and still. The others approached the body, and stood there and starred at it through the holes in their own faces where they had once had eyes.

A Brief Interview with a Homeless Man

“If you were king of the world, what would you do to help the homeless?”

“Nothin’.”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing.”

“Why not?”

“Cuz they’re assholes.”

“Homeless people are assholes?”

“Yup.”

“But you’re homeless….”

“Right, so I know. I know a lot of homeless people; they’re assholes. What do you know?”

A Spider in her Web

I was always a good and diligent wife and mother, wholesome and modest, selfless, kind, tending to her family with the attentiveness of a gardener to his garden, a businessman to his business, a spider to her web. Even after the diagnosis, my first priority was to help my family cope with a future that wouldn’t include me. At first. But now I find all I want to do is fuck strangers and kill people.

Novice Wizard

Harry Potter’s a lie. Magic doesn’t require wands, and there aren’t different sorts of magic, and it doesn’t have any rules. Magic is simply commanding reality, saying the sky is red, and then it’s red, or that the river is ice, and then it’s ice, or that the young woman manning the tacky little hat shop is an old woman, and then she’s an old woman. It’s as simple as that, if you have magic, and impossible of you don’t.

Here we have a novice wizard. “Don’t lock the door”, his dad had said, because his dad didn’t have the key to get back in. But our novice wizard saw in this an opportunity to develop his magic, so he locked the door and shut it. If his magic was strong enough he would just tell the door to open, and the door would be open.

His magic wasn’t strong enough. Now his dad was angry with him. It was hot outside, and boring, and they were already late for lunch before they got locked out of the house. But these are small things. If our wizard is ever to develop his magic, then he has to lock doors that he has no key to, over and over again, until he finds his magic. And if he never does, then he’s found that he lacks magic, which is almost as good, for it’s a much better thing to find by trying that you have no magic than it is to never find—by never trying—that you do.

The Good Samaritan

“What’s your birthday?”

“May 9th, 1969.”

A dental assistant is going through the usual routine with a new patient, a forty-eight year old man, clean shaven with a buzz cut, red hair flecked with white, a bald spot on the crown of his head, and dressed nicely with a pastel blue button up shirt, black slacks, a leather belt and shiny black leather dress shoes. He’s sitting in the dentist’s chair, reclined— the cuffs of his pants are hiked up, and the dental assistant can see even his socks are nice dress socks, dark blue argyle. But the man isn’t nice, she can see that clearly enough. Not to say that he’s mean, but he isn’t nice as in nicely dressed. This dentist’s office mostly gets poor people, people on state insurance. The man may be nicely dressed but he’s actually a bum, one that’s been taken in by some religious do-gooder who’s gotten him cleaned up, dressed up, and on state insurance, amongst other things. Their hope for him is that, if they can get him on his feet, he’ll be able to walk, so to speak, but unfortunately they’re wrong, in this case. The man may be kind, and gentle, and clean, as in not a drug addict, but he’s been on his feet before and each time winded up indigent. He’s dressed nicely but his face is weathered and he has the mannerisms of a prey animal, so nobody would be fooled.

“Are you taking any prescription medications?”

The man shakes his head no.

“Are you currently experiencing any tooth pain?”

The man again shakes his head no.

She fastens a cuff around his left wrist to measure his blood pressure. She instructs him to uncross his ankles, which he does, then she places his hand over his right shoulder and starts the machine. His blood pressure is on the high end of the normal range. She raises his chair, and he jumps. She apologizes for startling him, and explains she’s going to take some x-rays. She leaves the room for a moment and returns with a lead vest that she drapes over his torso and shoulders. She prepares a film for the first x-ray, wrapping it in plastic.

“Open”, she says, and the man does. He has no teeth. In place of teeth he has bits of gravel, shards of glass, screws and springs embedded in his gums, which are oozing bright red, fresh blood.

Five More Mastodon Droppings

Five more very short stories from my Mastodon, which, incidentally, I now know how to link directly to.

Utopia

In the future there will be no need for money. The production of everything will be either automated or done by a person considering the work to be play, and in either case the produce will be freely given away. There will be no pollution, the whole world made from a drop of sunlight, and not a bit gone to waste. Vast tracts of land will return to wilderness and we’ll steward it like we always should have. There will be only one class owning everything in common, because everyone else and their children will have starved long ago.

Chafing

Your existence chafes me. The fact that you dare to meet my gaze is galling. That you don’t grovel before me is an insult. You think you have a right to what’s yours? I disagree; you ought to have only what I allow you to have. If I had the power, (when I have the power), I’ll snuff you out as vengeance for ever having the arrogance to stand on two feet.

But, come on, don’t be so one-sided. Don’t be unreasonable. I’m willing to compromise. Let’s meet in the middle.

My Dad Says Goodbye

I saw my dad last night, on my front porch. He had stuffed himself into a corner, back pressed into the ceiling, holding himself up by his hands and feet, like Spider-Man. He tried to pretend he was a dummy, but I saw the glint of light when his eye twitched. Last time I’d seen him we were both passing through the train station in Seattle. At the time I wondered how long it takes for the family to learn when a homeless person is found dead. I suppose it’s forever in some cases.

After snapping a photo as proof, I went to unlock my front door. The sound of the key must’ve spooked him. I heard a flutter, looked to his corner, and he was gone.

Totality

The moon passed before the sun, and under its shadow crowds cheered, and a few people cried. One minute, two minutes, the cheering continued. Five minutes, ten minutes, a worried murmuring. After an hour, everyone was crying.

Equanimity

Joann became god while riding her bike after school one day. As god, she ignored her curfew. It was dark when she got home; her house was in flames. Her dad was at work, her baby brother was upstairs in his crib, and her mom was on the lawn screaming for help between long, wheezing gasps. She had rushed into the house, over and over, only to be repelled by the smoke and the flames. Joann could see that her mom had a strong preference that her son not be burned, but, as god, she couldn’t see why.

My Arm

I remember we were in the middle of a heatwave and I was headed for the bathroom to take a cold bath since we didn’t have air conditioning. As I approached the bathroom I caught my reflection in the mirror, and I noticed my arm— I don’t know why, I just remember noticing it. I looked away, probably into Sam’s room—it was kitty-corner to the bathroom in that house—but then I looked back into the mirror again and my arm was gone. I started to scream. Sam rushed in from the backyard, terrified, and she started screaming too. The neighbors ended up calling the police. That was a few months ago now. I’ve gotten a lot of help since then. The medication’s helped a lot, but I’ve also had to put in a lot of work— a lot of work. I have a ways to go still, but I’ve started to come to terms with the fact that I never had an arm. —And next week they say I can start having supervised visits with Sam.

Smiles and Nods

It’s twelve fifteen and a woman is waiting in a busy coffee shop for a man she doesn’t know named Scot. He was supposed to meet her at the door but when she arrived she found no one, understandable considering the rain. She looked for Scot inside, but since she didn’t know him she was only looking for a man that seemed to be looking for a woman— that is to say a man who has an appointment to meet a woman for a job interview. This will be her third in-person interview for this position, a receptionist at a small software firm, and she was hoping it would be her last.

She’d never met Scot before but she did have his phone number. She tried it but it went straight to voicemail. She tried the woman in human resources also, since she was her contact at the company and since it was her that had arranged the hiring process up till this point, but that also went straight to voicemail. This wasn’t surprising. It’d been this way with everything, not just the interviews. Her applications had disappeared twice and following up on them had shown her right from the start that the people at this company were allergic to phones. She had to take her resume in and physically hand it over to the woman in HR to get anywhere, and then it was a phone interview that she was told was on Tuesday but which was supposed to be on Thursday, and another phone interview that just straight slipped the interviewer’s mind, an on-site interview with a man who had a thousand more important things on his mind, and another at eight o’clock in the evening. That last one took place in the parking lot— the man she was interviewing with only remembered the interview when he saw her in the parking lot as he was leaving for home. They chatted at length about many things beside his car, interminable small talk having nothing to do with her ability to be a receptionist at their company, and if he noticed her teeth chattering from the cold he didn’t mind. Some people wouldn’t have put up with it. People who don’t need a job, for instance.

After fifteen minutes of waiting, her phone rings, a text from Scot asking where she is. There’s a man standing outside, holding an umbrella and looking at his phone. She crosses the coffee shop to let him in.

“You must be Scot”, she says from inside the door she’s holding open for him.

“--— —.—--—— —--— —”, he replies, as if speaking, but instead of words, hissing and buzzing and popping like an arc of electricity rippling through the air. She looks at him uncomprehending.

“…What?”

“--—------, —?”

She smiles and nods like the hard of hearing do and tells the man she’s gotten them a table. The man smiles and follows. “Do you want to order anything before we get started?”, she asks as they pass the line for the register.

“— —”, the man replies, breaking off from her. “--—— —--—— —?—--—----— —.”

“…I’ll be over at that table, over there”, she tells him, pointing to the spot where she’d been waiting. She looks around the room, watches people in conversation, and she listens. There’s a lot of noise in the coffee shop, but she can pick out their words. Then it isn’t her hearing. But she looks at the man in line, watches him order his coffee. From across the room she can hear the buzzing and crackling coming from him, but the cashier rings him up without trouble. Then it isn’t his speach….

After ordering, he waits by the counter, and his order must’ve been simple as it’s handed to him quickly. He joins her at the table, setting down the coffee cup and his phone, which is running an audio recorder.

“--—------—--------——--—--,—----—--— —.”

Again she smiles and nods. She figures he must’ve said something about the recorder. Glancing at his coffee, she sees the lid has “Scott” written on it— two t’s, but close enough. At least she knows she’s talking to the right person. Or, something like talking.

“--—----—--—----—----— —,—------,—--—--— —--—--—--—--—--—----. —--,—--—--——--—------, (— —--—--),—--—------.—--— —--—— —…—--—--— —--—--?”

She smiles and nods once more, hoping that what he’d just said wasn’t a question she was expected to answer, but he keeps looking to her like he expects more of a response than a smile and a nod.

“I’m just looking for a fast-paced team that I can grow with”, she tosses out limply, figuring that whatever he may have asked, that’s a pretty all-right interviewey thing to say, but as the words topple out of her their stupidity rings in her ears and the sad humor of the situation—that here she is, a miracle of life, and this is how she spends her time, and these are the things she uses what may be the rarest phenomenon in the universe, language, to say—makes her chortle, but she catches herself and fakes a little cough to cover it.

He smiles at her pleasantly and says, “--.—— —. —----—----—— —— —--—------—--—--—--—--—--”, and extends his hand to her. She shakes it and smiles. “--—--—— —--—----.—--—--—------?—--….”

He had shaken her hand and stood up, so the interview must be done. Short, but that could be good or bad. Probably bad, she thinks. Either way she’s glad to be done with it.

“Thank you”, she says, but the cafe is crowded and noisy and he mishears her and thinks she said “No thank you.” It doesn’t make much difference. He smiles again, she smiles back. On the way out he gives her a little departing wave. She eyes a chocolate croissants in the pastry case but decides not to waste the money on it, what with her unemployment almost gone, (not that two dollars seventy-five cents is going to save her anyway). Later on that afternoon she’ll get an email from the woman in HR, and to her surprise, it’ll be a job offer. She’ll then return to the coffee shop and buy one of those chocolate croissants, to celebrate. At last! she got a job.

Language may be the rarest phenomenon in the universe, but the job market wants smiles and nods.

The Whole Point of the Cult

The whole point of the cult was to scratch together a little money, enough to stay afloat and give me the time to write, and then, hopefully, make a name for myself as a writer and, if I were lucky, get to a place where I could do it for a living. After that I’d tell my disciples that they’ve made it, that they didn’t need me anymore, that the faith was in their hands now. But almost from the start it took over my life, pushing everything else out. Now, even if I could find the time, I could never be a writer. The only people that would read anything I wrote would be my disciples, and to them it would be the infallible word of god. If anyone else even chanced upon my writing, the first thing they’d know about it is that it was written by that crazy cult leader they sort of recall hearing about once before. In either case, who wrote it overshadows what’s written.

You know, I never wanted a job. I never wanted to be employed, to be someone’s instrument, to be someone’s object. All I wanted was to carve out just a little space, a little time, where I could do what I pleased. Where I could write. That’s why I started the cult.

A Perfectly Lovely Ride

It’s a perfectly lovely night to go for a drive. The air is cool outside, which is a relief after such a hot day. Back home is still full of the air from the late afternoon heat; the cool night air won’t seep in until three, four in the morning. In my car, speeding down the freeway, the air gushes in and I’m soaking it up. Right now it’s wonderful, but I have work in the morning, so I’ll need to be home before three or four in the morning, and the cool I’m enjoying now will make the stifling heat of my bedroom that much worse when I return. More importantly though—at least for right now—right now, it’s wonderful.

But hold on a tick— I don’t remember starting the car. I was in my underwear, sitting on the couch beneath the ceiling fan, just sweating and hating life. I stepped outside and it was nice, so I sat on the porch, still in my underwear—it was late so no one would see anything—and life was great. Then the mosquitos started eating me. That’s when I decided to go for a ride. But I don’t remember going back inside and getting my keys, or getting dressed, (I’m in shorts and a t-shirt now), and I don’t remember starting the car….

It’s quiet outside— it’s quite inside too. It doesn’t sound like the engine’s running. I can’t even hear the tires turning over the pavement. The only sound is the wind whistling by, like I’m falling. The ride is smooth, too— too smooth. The speedometer, tachometer, engine temperature gauge, and fuel gauge all read zero, and the dash isn’t lit up. I feel for the key in the ignition, but there’s nothing there.

Now I see everything with fresh eyes. The road is dark out ahead of me. It’s because my headlights aren’t on, but it’s not only that. The streetlights aren’t lit, and there are no headlights from the oncoming traffic, no headlights in my mirrors, no taillights from the traffic ahead of me. I ease up on the gas, but nothing happens. I take my foot off the gas completely, but I don’t slow down a bit. I touch the brakes and nothing— I press a little harder, but still nothing— I stomp on the pedal, putting it all the way to the floor, but nothing happens. I turn the steering wheel this way and that, but it makes no difference. I pull the parking break. None of it makes a difference. Nothing I do makes a difference. I’m not in control.

Miss Crachen’s Camera

By day, Miss Crachen was a second grade school teacher; by night she was an inventor, though not a productive one. She would give up on an invention once she saw that it would work, being interested only in the surprising, not the obvious. Having the keen mind that she did, one able to quickly see the implications of things, this meant that she didn’t often get to the point of even building a prototype to test. The problem was aggravated by the fact that Miss Crachen was arrogant—an affliction not untypical amongst people with keen minds—and so tended to trust the fullness of her understanding too much. All her life people tried to correct Miss Crachen’s arrogance. They would tell her, “You think you know everything, but you don’t. You think ‘this’, but actually it’s ‘that.’” Unfortunately they were always wrong. “This” was, in fact, “this”, not “that”, so their attempts to correct her arrogance only reinforced it.

Miss Crachen would receive an idea for an invention while cooking, or cleaning, or taking a bath, or on the drive to or from work. The idea would fall in her lap all on its own, and she would pick it up, she would look at it, examine it, turn it over, take it apart. When she could see the whole thing, hold it in her mind all at once, she’d throw it away. Once she’d eaten the flesh, she would discard the rind, and meanwhile five or six fresh, ripe ideas would have fallen into her lap.

Then, one morning, while buttering a slice of toast, an idea came to her for a very high-speed video camera, and this proved to be a very difficult invention. An artichoke, with not much flesh, and difficult to eat. It was difficult enough that it kept her wrestling with it. She couldn’t simply devour it like lesser ideas, and so she turned out an actual prototype— not her first, but one of only a very few.

Miss Crachen estimated the time resolution of her camera at roughly one trillion frames a second, or, to put it more precisely, she estimated the time between two successive frames was close to a trillionth of a second. This is an important distinction. There are what seem to be very high-speed cameras giving that kind of time resolution, but while it may be sort of fair to describe them as capable of capturing a trillion frames a second, you cannot honestly say that the time between two of their successive frames is a trillionth of a second. They work by capturing periodic phenomena, a laser repeatedly firing for instance, at slightly different moments, and then putting the frames together, kind of like stop motion animation combined with time-lapse photography. It could take minutes, or hours, or more to capture a thousand frames, whereas Miss Crachen’s high-speed camera was straightforwardly a high-speed camera, and if it ran for a second it would capture a trillion frames.

The first test was conducted in her living room. She set up a tent around her couch and smoked several cigarettes inside it, then she fired a laser mounted on the armrest of her couch and filmed its progress with her prototype camera. She filmed for only 125 millionths of a second but captured over two hours worth of footage played back at a hundred frames a second. Once the test had been performed—a fraction of a blink of an eye—Miss Crachen eagerly played back the result.

Miss Crachen had thought it would be cute if she were in the frame for the test, so the first thing she saw on her laptop when the video started playing was what looked like a still photograph of her smiling face. After several minutes of nothing happening, a little fleck of red appeared on the right side of the frame. Miss Crachen cheered the little fleck on as it slowly—agonizingly slowly—stretched out, but she ran out of enthusiasm when the beam was as long as the breadth of her thumbnail.

She could’ve quit watching at that point—the test had been confirmed a success—but she felt the diligent thing to do was to watch the whole video, to see with her own eyes the red thread of light’s journey across the frame. She took down the tent, microwaved a bag of popcorn, and made herself comfortable on the couch. For forty minutes she watched the video play only out of the corner of her eye while she snacked on popcorn and dinked around on her phone, but then something in the video moved suddenly, catching her eye. She looked from the little screen to the bigger one. She saw her face frozen like in a photograph—as before—and she saw the laser rolling steadily onward—again, as it had been—but over her shoulder she saw the zipper on the tent being undone shakily, in fits and starts, but swiftly, as if it had been filmed at normal speed. When a crack of a few inches had been made in the tent flap, in they all poured like baby spiders bursting out of their egg sac, swarming over every surface and blackening the very air: Monsters.