The Earth has two civilization, though one of them is absolutely unaware of the other. The latter are the ‘Fish’, so-called because they live in the seas and oceans of the world. That is where they originated and where they remain. However, they are an inquisitive bunch. Thus, they find it expedient to explore the microscopic as well as the sub-microscopic fauna in order to learn more about… well, about everything else. It is their view that the world at large, the one they can see and feel, cannot be understood and manipulated to full advantage unless they have an intimate knowledge of the building blocks of matter and even life itself.
At a time long ago, their experimentation led them down different paths, some profitable, others disastrous, and still others, utterly whimsical. Dinosaurs, dodo birds, other birds of which existence and disappearance we have not the first inkling, whales, dolphins, lizards, frogs, alligators and crocodiles, mammals of every stripe, including homosapiens, centaurs, pans (the creature, not the implement), Cyclops, the great sphinx and all manner of oddball animals form a short list of by-products of these experiments. Homosapiens, or humans as we call ourselves, was not necessarily the ultimate goal they had in mind, but what the hell, we’re here and we’ll just have to do.
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Eric lay on his back in his darkened bedroom, his hands joined above his head. His mind was not entirely empty, and the reason was not because of the usual random thoughts or fleeting images created by his mind to relieve itself of the oppressive boredom that stalked it. He was puzzled and it was refreshing. There was now something, some thing, to think about and it had nothing to do with, well, never mind.
“So you ready to tuk a bit, eh?”
For a moment, he thought the voice had issued from his dresser which sat dumbly against the wall a few feet away to his left. It had been painted a number of times over its lifetime and the uneven coat it currently wore was of a dark shade of gray, reminiscent of old charcoal. It had no legs to speak of, just stumps, one of which was missing.
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The sauna was designed to hold at least twelve individuals comfortably on two sets of tiered benches arrayed against facing walls. The man sat naked on his white towel balancing his weight forward on his arms, perspiration just now beginning to bead on his skin. He noted absently that said perspiration seemed to avoid his limp penis. “Doesn’t it have sweat glands?” he thought. “Maybe it just doesn’t bead the same way.”
“Hot in here, isn’t it?”
Another man, this one quite wrinkled over every inch of his skin and almost skeletal in aspect sat across from him. He had elected to drape his towel across his lap. His name was, ah, Frank. (more…)
In the beginning, well, never mind. Instead, picture this in your mind’s eye. There is a room outside a building, in fact hanging from a building, exactly two stories above a parking lot. This room, like most, has four walls. The distinction, apart from its altitude and its peculiar location is that three of those four walls are made of reinforced glass, not quite bullet proof, but sturdy enough. Zoom in some, if you please, to view the inside. There you see a chair. It’s sitting against the one concrete wall and looks, if you can for a moment endow the chair with a hint of personality, well it looks glum. The reason for this state of mind could very logically be attributed to the sorry fact that the sole occupant of this room elected to sit on the concrete floor rather than sensibly giving the chair some purpose. The man, instead, slouched on the hard concrete floor beside the chair, his eyes fixed in the distance.
There was a tree there amongst the dozen or so trees that lined the vacant visitors’ parking lot two stories below, and it wasn’t significant in any way, this tree, other than that it was directly in his line of sight. A paper fluttered to the foot of the tree for a moment before being taken again by the warm noonday breeze that the man couldn’t feel. He might have wished for a window to open, but he didn’t. If a thought had been allowed to be recognized, he would have asked the rhetorical question uttered by all in his state of mind, ‘Why bother?’
“This is what you might call a, um, basket case.”
(more…)
Viewed from a distance, Mount Meag’r appeared to the casual observer to be no more than a good-sized hill amongst a few dozen other good-sized hills which pimpled the barren coast of a piddling and murky sea to the east vaguely alluded to as The Eastern Sea. (This presumably implied another such sea to one or the other points on the compass but no-one thus far has cared enough to expend the necessary nervous energy to verify that assumption.) Mount Meag’r’s only distinguishing characteristic apart from being just slightly more good-sized than its sisters, slightly rounder and to some extent craggier and timid as opposed to unpretentious, was the fact that it was topped with a tree. It was actually more of a bush, specifically a black berry bush.
If the observer had been less casual and somewhat more inquisitive, he would have noticed a darkish dot slowly moving up Mount Meag’r’s eastern slope. If this same observer or another of his group had been well prepared and had remembered to tote along his binoculars just in case he spotted a darkish dot in the distance, he could have resolved this current dot into the figure of an elderly man wearing a full-length robe of some rough and dark material gathered at the waist by something tan and sinewy and carrying a long stick curved at one end, and which the man evidently used as a climbing aid to negotiate the sometimes steep pitch of Mount Meag’r.
The observer, if he had been of the sensitive type, might have caught his breath in alarm at seeing the elderly man suddenly hopping on one leg while at the same time trying to keep his balance for fear of tumbling back and risking a painful and possibly life-threatening descent through stones and jagged boulder edges.
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