that’s all she wrote. [trigger #365]

My wife is lost to me, and I am running out of what she left behind.

She traveled at the beginning of every week, taking a commuter flight to Spokane to teach at Gonzaga. Monday mornings she would wake before me, get a rideshare to the airport, and be gone until Thursday. Those mornings when she left, she always wrote me a letter and left it on the kitchen table. The notes were playful, normally about a page long. She’d write out bad jokes, make up dirty stories, draw cartoons… anything she felt inspired to leave behind at the moment. We would still call and text every day, but there was something special about those letters. There was a warmth in them that made me miss her less.

Six weeks ago, her Uber driver was texting and driving. He crossed into oncoming traffic at 60 mph and three cars of people were killed, my wife among them.

I’d gotten up late for work that day and rushed from the house without reading my wife’s letter. The police called me at the office. By the time I got home I knew my wife would never be walking through that door again.

I sat at the dining room table with her letter in front of me. I couldn’t bring myself to read it. It was the very last thing my wife would ever tell me. It would be the last new jokes, the final story. I would never hear a new thing from her ever again.

It took me two weeks to start reading it. First I needed to come up with a plan of how I would go about it. I needed a strategy. I couldn’t just read it thoughtlessly. I decided the best course of action was to read a sentence every week. I block the bottom of the letter with a piece of construction paper. I reread that sentence  again and again, and reread the previous week’s sentences as well. I don’t know how many sentences are in the letter. There is no way to count without potentially seeing one of the future sentences. I know I am at the end of the first paragraph this week, about a third of the way down the page.

My wife is gone, and two thirds of a letter is all I have left.

 

41. [trigger #364]

The universe is a dangerous place. Our isolated little planet is a vulnerable one. Even just the things in the universe that the average person can learn about is enough to frighten, but there is far more out there lurking in the dark corners and dimensions than we imagine. There are intelligences and beings of all sorts, some who play by rules so different from our own we would only be able to comprehend them as magical. Many are indifferent to us, some are even sympathetic. But some are very much a danger to us all. The reasons vary greatly. Some seek to destroy us from hunger, some for sport, some for commercial reasons, others because they’ve lost connection to anything a civilization would call reason or sense a long time ago. Either way, the earth needs someone to protect it. One of the best kept secrets of our world is that there are those who protect us from outside threats. 41 someones actually. Always 41 at a time. Scattered around the world, chosen for a variety of reasons, all willing to lay down their lives to save the world. These 41 have delivered us from danger many times. When one of their number falls, she or he is replaced. Three separate times in recorded history they have all fallen, and it is only blind luck that has kept our species alive during the transition into a entirely new 41. The last time this happened was in 1971. All 41 appeared to spontaneously combust. We don’t know how or why. Perhaps they were engaged in some battle and paid the ultimate price to win the day. Perhaps they were all assassinated by some dark power, which was the leading theory at the time but it has fallen out of favor since there never seemed to be another step to the plan, whoever carried it out surely wouldn’t have let us reestablish the 41 after successfully eliminating a past version.

 

enter night. [trigger #363]

The reason most people have trouble with Night is because they resist her. All her associations with death and endings and violence give people pause. And many just aren’t wired to enjoy her company. They need the safety of daylight, the warmth of the sunshine, the bustle of productive life. Those people are not my tribe.

For those of us who take the time to get to know Night on her own terms, we happy few, the reward is great. Once she senses your openness and welcomes you into her domain, the treasures that await are immeasurable.

It’s not that her kingdom isn’t home to death, and endings, and the lost time of sleep. It’s that her kingdom is also the home of dreams, magic, mystery, and passion. Time moves sideways for those who learn how to embrace Night’s rhythms. A new life is found by the waking and the watchful in the small hours of the morning. The small band of us who learn to say “Good Morning,” to the moon uncover doors that aren’t there in the daylight.

Night welcomes newcomers, not as guests, but as her children. The curious and the discontent find they feel at home when they let Night be their guide. The voracious and the strange feel a nostalgia for a place they’ve never been, they hum along to a song they’ve never heard but know by heart.

Once you’ve truly come to know Night, fallen in love with her and her kingdom and her people, the daylight becomes empty.

i broke my glasses. [trigger #362]

 

They’re here. Right outside the door. They’re trying to be quiet but I can hear them moving around on the porch. I knew they were coming. Everything is prepared. I’ve seen Home Alone. And I know how much more lethal that shit is in real life. The problem is, I fell off the ladder when I was setting up the last paint can pendulum trap, and I broke my glasses. I can’t see shit. That was always one of those movie tropes that scared the hell out of me growing up. The broken glasses right at the worst moment, when it’s a life or death fight against the aliens or the zombies or the whatevers. Then, that improbably cliche shit happens to me. Not with zombies or aliens, but with those goddamned redneck Grovesnors. My gun is going to be a bit less reliable now, but hopefully if I just point it at the slightly darker blurry patches when I shoot I’ll at least wing one of ’em.

So, anyway, no glasses. Flying blind. Five of them, one of me. Power is down. No way to call the cops. I just have to hope all my traps hold up. And away we go.

no hair, don’t care. [trigger #361]

Field Report, Sgt. Agleclor Mzzp, Observational Note #52: I’ve finally fixed the translator tech after damage from the crash. Communication with dominant species coming along much more quickly now, as the holo-hardware that makes me appear as one of them was miraculously undamaged. Primary species refer to themselves has “humans.” Wildly varied in appearance, even to my eyes. Skin tone, shape, height, and mass all change from one to another.  Unlike us, many seem keen to accentuate the differences, styling garments to separate themselves from one another.

Interestingly, the most have a native substance that grows directly out of their skin. They call it hair. Disgusting stuff. At first I thought it might have been caused by genetic manipulation of some sort, but too many of the lower species on the planet are covered in the stuff, so I believe it is left over from a previous evolutionary step the humans went through. It grows in oddly placed tufts all over the body, including from the face of some! Often, “humans” will remove it with sharp blades in various forms. It seems to be densest for most on the tops, sides, and back of the head. They style and shape it in fascinating ways, none of them doing much to lessen how detestable it all is.

I have to do more research on the topic, but my initial recommendation is that if corporate decides that we are actually going to open Sol.3 to tourist activity, we might want to develop a pathogen to render the humans hairless, or else the planet might be too horrible for mass appeal.

life is different out here. [trigger #360]

I grew up in various major cities around the country. My mom brokered the terms of mergers between major banks and corporations and whatnot. She was one of the best at what she did, which meant she was often called upon when things were particularly complicated or contentious. It meant long term projects requiring us to move based on the location of various headquarters. The long and short of it is that all of my formative years were spent learning to navigate a new urban environment.

All of the cities we lived in were unique. Some were diverse, others were very monochromatic, with a slight variation in shade by not much in an actual color shift. Some were violent and dangerous, others were tame. Some were vibrant and interesting, others were gentrified beyond the point of no return, practically suburbs stacked up high instead of spread out across the sprawl.

Yet, for all the differences, there was usually a rhythm I could sense that would help me adjust. I’d just have to get a sense what what that city’s particular version of the rhythm was, get in step with it, and I’d be able to manage until it was time to move again. The adjustments got easier and easier over time, until staying still would have been the real challenge.

Take me out of a city, though, and I have no idea how to deal. And I am currently about as far from a city as someone can get. I sometimes go weeks without seeing another human face in person, unless Jeanine comes by to drop off fuel and supplies. I’m lonely, and I’m pretty sure I’m losing my mind. Such is life on a mining station on an asteroid that only requires one person to operate it. I’m a guinea pig, because they are paying me extra to see how I do alone, since normally they’d send out more people than was strictly required to do the job, just for mental health reasons.

I thought that, after all those term-limited stints I had growing up that I could adapt to anything for a time, but I was very, very wrong. I’m not adapting to this at all, even if I am halfway through.

There was a time I felt bad for folks who lived in small towns or the country. Right about now I would kill to be able to upgrade to a small town.

When they say that in space, no one can hear you scream, they should have added that there’d be no one there to hear it anyway. I need to get home.

keep the change, ya filthy animal. [trigger #359]

The hotel room ceiling has an interesting topography. There are cracks, bumps, water stains, and spots with spackle covered with the wrong color paint. I wish I was sleeping, even though it is 3:00 in the afternoon. Sleep last night was spare, as it always is for me in a hotel room, and I wish I could doze now and find a few of those missing hours of rest in a nap. Instead, I have the television on with the volume turned up, and I’m staring at the ceiling trying to pretend that the linen closet isn’t right across the hall from my room, and that there aren’t two women sitting in that closet with the door open because there is nothing to clean on a slow week like this one. It makes it impossible for me to rest, having strangers sitting out there, just a few feet away from me right now, practically staring at my door. I have the volume up so high because otherwise I can hear them talking, and when you can hear someone talking it makes it tough to pretend they don’t exist.

Home Alone is on TBS, which is strange because it’s May, and I didn’t realize they played that movie on television when it isn’t Christmas. My attention fixes on a particularly long crack in the ceiling as Kevin McCallister is watching Angels with Filthy Souls on tv. “Keep the change, ya filthy animal!” A line as iconic for every kid born in the early 80’s as any other line, but all that nostalgia still isn’t enough to make me forget the women hovering outside my room.

an apartment in hoboken. [trigger #358]

After the death of a spouse, there are often revelations in the process of tying up loose ends and sorting through the files, possessions, workspaces, hard drives, and finances that make up a life these days.

In the more sensational versions of these discoveries, on soap operas and Lifetime movies, the revelation is of a secret family or a murdered twin and a stolen identity, or something else equally salacious. In most real life cases, it’s more innocuous. A secret fetish for 1800’s erotica, or an addiction to celebrity gossip.

After Margaret died, my revelation about her lands somewhere in between.

Going through her office and looking through her private finances with our accountant, we discovered that Margaret had been renting an apartment across the river in Hoboken for the last sixteen years.

The was shocking to me for a great number of reasons, not the least of which her vocal disdain for New Jersey. Apparently, she was actually in Jersey quite often, when she was supposedly working late or grabbing drinks with friends.

The space was just a few blocks away from where baseball was invented, a fact that Margaret most certainly would have been ignorant of. Even if she’d been told she had a habit of forgetting things she didn’t care about moments after hearing them. Then again, maybe she was spending as much time at baseball games I didn’t know about as she was spending in New Jersey.

Of course, I’m still a bit in shock. I honestly didn’t think we had any secrets, at least not big ones. Not clandestine apartment sized secrets.

When I went over there for the first time, I was worried I’d discover some love nest, less because there might have been another person she had been sleeping with and sharing her life with, but because it was something she felt I shouldn’t know. I guess in that light it was as bad as I’d feared, because I really did find her secret love, and she really did feel the need to keep that love from me.

Her secret apartment was full of original art, a skill I didn’t know she’d used since college, even though I’d tried several times over the years to get her painting again. There were hundreds of paintings, all fitting the same pattern. Every painting was a recreation of a different famous Renaissance paintings, but to each one she added a dog wearing a party hat. The dog on each painting was a different breed. There in Mona Lisa’s lap was a Pomeranian wearing a colorful triangular hat with a fuzzy ball on its point. In the foreground of The Rape of Europa, there was a mastiff in the same hat. Over here is a recreation of Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love, with the addition of a Westland terrier, head cocked to one side curiously as he watches that fat little cupid baby dig around inside that sarcophagus or what have you.

Her motives are lost on my. Whatever metaphors she was getting at apparently as inscrutable to me as she was, not that I knew she was inscrutable just a short time ago, but this apartment makes it quite clear how well I could read her.

Some say you never really know anyone, and in light of these recent events I’m going to have to say I agree.   

it’s the elevator music of the soul. [trigger #357]

“Hey, you should smile.”

“Don’t do that.”

“Don’t do what?”

“Don’t tell a woman to smile. It’s really shitty.”

“What’s shitty about that?”

“For one, it’s sexist. It perpetuates the idea that I have to be pleasant and happy all the time in order to make men feel more comfortable and at ease. It’s the same logic that carried to its conclusion would have men say I’m a bitch if I don’t smile enough or sweet enough or whatever.”

“That’s not what I meant though. I just feel bad when my friends aren’t happy.”

“I know. That doesn’t change the fact that the things you say exist in a preexisting context. Still, context aside, you still shouldn’t tell me to smile. That’s not to make me happy, I’m obviously not going to have wild change in mood or circumstance because you tell me to smile.

“The entire mentality is like the elevator music of the soul.”

“The what-now?”

“Elevator music. No one actually likes it. It’s shitty music that is so insistent that we should all feel calm and mellow and even-keeled. All it really does is make me want to beat someone with a wrench.”

“Right, so maybe I should just let you smile when you actually feel like smiling and handle my own emotions when your frowning makes me uncomfortable.”

“Good plan.”

 

an angel gets its wings. [trigger #356]

Az had been hoping for his wings for a long time. Back before the dawn of humanity, after lines had been drawn in an ancient conflict that predates our species, Az made the mistake of angering the wrong superior, and has spent the last 100,000 years or so getting back in good graces. It took a lot of blood, his own and that of others, before he had the bit of leverage he needed to position himself for a real shot at getting his wings, of joining Hell’s chosen soldiers in the war against the light.

Now, here he was on Earth for the first time in centuries. It’s the first time he’s made the trip left to his own devices, without a leash and collar of one form or another. With so much to see and do, so many possible delights to enjoy and trouble to cause, it took a considerable amount of willpower to remind himself that there was work to be done. This was not a vacation, there would be time for that later. This time there was a task at hand. After so long waiting, he couldn’t afford to fail now, and risk another several ages of servitude and misery.

To get his wings, Az had to corrupt a soul. Fortunately for him, this is an easy task. When it comes to humans, corruption is a simple thing. It will take some time by human standards, but for Az a few decades would be almost no time at all. Humanity is easy to corrupt for a number of reasons, not the least of which the fact that from an early age people are always waiting for a moment of truth, a singular moment in their story when they are forced to decide between evil or good, darkness or light. They are always awaiting to be presented with a faustian bargain in which they can choose to give away their soul or choose the high road with dignity and moral fortitude. It’s a delightful misdirection for creatures like Az.

Of course, one’s soul is rarely given away all at once. Far more often, the soul is given away piecemeal, one small bit at a time. A bit of compromise here, a little discrepancy there, and the slow descent into hell is barely noticeable, the water heated up so slowly that the frog is cooked before he knows he’s uncomfortable.

The reasons for this way of taking a soul are myriad. For one, it is a surer bet. Chipping away a bit at a time is less risky than taking one big swing at the risk of being noticed. And of course, it’s just more enjoyable to work a little at a time. Why swallow down a soul whole, not even tasting its goodness, when one can savor it one bite at a time?