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.