The time before world’s waking

Light appeared everywhere at once. It was blue, and it didn’t come from the sky. The glow came from the roofs, the walls, and the pavement. It came out of the frost covering the cars. It lifted from people’s skin.

The advance was immeasurable. In an instant, there was simply more of it, and it seemed that it had always been just as bright as it is now. It was rising like a steady flood, evenly filling everything everywhere at once.

Everything seemed nascent and tentative. It seemed more like a sketch of the world than the world itself. Everything shimmered in the unreal blue light. Then, in an imperceptible transition, the sketch began to acquire textures and weight, until it all didn’t seem quite so imagined anymore.

Smiling?

Aside

Drive is a great and right movie. This doesn’t have much to do with it, though. Just a little.

Friends

“Why is he smiling?”

The operator moves into the glare of the screen. The cool, dry air of the observation room makes him squint at the screen, where in a flurry of shifting green pixels a man has wrapped himself in blankets in the bare and public stage of his private home.

Hum of the fans, chatter of the keys, chatter in the speakers. High-resolution cameras scanning the dark windows of the man’s house. Neural sensors coming online, following the minute muscle activity. Low-frequency microphone probes examining heart rate and breathing. Facial recognition modules, expression analyzers, secondary operator …

The operators, the autonomous machines, the mainframes, the vast floating airship silently sailing above the night-time city concentrate their collective, inquisitorial gaze on the man in his blanket. With air waves, light beams, wires, fibers, electrodes, algorithms, as one aggregate creature with the sole purpose of assuring the continual and mechanically perfect existence, the complex wraps the man in a cold embrace.

It is an embrace that is closer and tighter than any lover’s. It captures every impulse, every breath, every muscle tick, every hair, every drop of sweat, every shiver, every look and thought. And yet,

“Why is he smiling?”

The man with the favors

A glass of expensive whiskey and a cigarette in the right hand.  A chrome-plated pistol in the left. Whiskey held casually at waist height. Three-quarters burn on the cigarette with just a bit of ash, with a simple, understated fragrance that instantly puts images of leather saddles bags in your mind.

A perfectly starched white pin-stripe shirt – necktie loose, top button undone – and tailor-trimmed slacks would normally place this man in a luxurious board room. But the gun – the gun held back just enough to not be obvious, but just large enough to not go unnoticed – makes the scene wrong, surreal.

How could one person make such a transition – from exclusive glass-and-steel to this place, standing a puddle of… Blood? Sweat? Waste water? – with such ease? Some people are just natural at wearing a suit. This man is a natural at wearing Fifth Avenue’s best while carrying a gun in a run-down warehouse.

“Well greetings to you. Fuck you.”

Fathers

Varston and Ezra sat across the small camp fire from each other. So far Ezra has done most of the talking, while the older ranger calmly stared into the flames. It was dying, slowly turning into a handful of glowing coals. The night was warm, so there wasn’t much need for a fire aside from boiling a bit of water for tea.

Ezra reached a pause, and it grew into a somewhat extended silence. Finally, Varston looked up at the boy, and said with a smirk,

“So I guess we both didn’t know our fathers.”

“I know my father!” The boy shot back, glowering.

“Do you now?”

“I grew up with him! I grew up in his house – he raised me!”

“No no no, lad. You knew a nice guy who’d tuck you in at night and wash your face in the morning. But for your father, that was pretend. That’s a part he played. Kind of like a hobby. Your real father stalked the shadows and stabbed orcs in the heart. And that’s no easy trick, either, the bastards can see in the dark better than the bloody elves. Once you get used to the smell of blood, you can’t just walk back to picnics and cute tea cozies.”

“My father is not a killer…” Ezra stared at Varston in shock.

“Ezra, I’m taking you to see your sister. A sister you didn’t even know you had until maybe a month ago. Think on that. I didn’t know your father, but I’ll bet this isn’t the last surprise.”

The conversation arrived at another tense pause. Eventually, Varston spoke up.

“I’m not saying your father was evil. I respect the things I’ve heard about him. And by your words, sure sounds like he was a good dad. He just wasn’t the man you think he was.

“The difference between you and me is that when we get to the end of the line and walk through the Big Shiny Doors, you’ll know who to look for and I won’t. And that is a luxury you shouldn’t take for granted.”

Move the mountain

Aside

Oh, dear Florence!

These rocks

With the chain wrapped around his shoulders, he leaned forward and took a step. The chain stretched tight, snapping the air under his force. He leaned again, roared, pulled, and made another step.

Another chain whipped from the ground and latched on to his leg, dragging him back. He didn’t give up a hair’s width, single-mindedly pushing his way forward. Chain after chain appeared, clinging to him, wrapping around his legs and arms. They tried to tear him down, choke him, crush his ribs. Yet his eyes burned with fury and he pulled until the chains started ripping up the ground around him.

The chains brought rocks and boulders, tried to bury him under a pile of granite. They covered him whole, blocked out his sun. With great noise and thunder, the pile grew into a hill, and then into a mountain. And everyone thought, well, there goes the hero.

But I stayed and watched for a thousand years.

And today.

The mountain moved.

Tell me

Tell me,
How have you been?
How is school and how is work?
Tell me
Over gin or coffee
In some tiny crooked spot,
Overcrowded and hot.
Tell me that you are ok.
Tell me,
Have you gone out dancing?
Did you find a hot new band?
Tell me that those days are still out there,
That they didn’t drown in whiskey,
That the madness isn’t dead,
That it wasn’t just a dream.
Tell me you’ve got things to say,
And then tell me what they are.
Tell me,
With a smile or with a scowl,
In a word or monologue,
Tell me that I am still alive
And if you still remember me.
Tell me,
How is the weather?
Do you still live on that street?
How’s rooster and how’s the cat?
Tell me anything at all.