Lately I have been devising strategies to trick myself into creating something. I come up with various exercises, low commitment stunt projects, fire and forget one offs. Nothing wrong with that, I guess.

But I still must return to the font, which now wheezes and gasps a faint mist (or is it now sand?). In my ponderings of what may have happened to my creative fire I have drawn a correlation to having become less crazy. The unspoken agreement has worked too well and the safe harbor from the storms of my mind has become a home. From this vantage point I observed much, my world held before me in a snow globe, regarded with clear eyes.

I have spent much of my life in fear of various measuring sticks. I always felt I was getting it wrong, that I was found wanting. This permeated all spheres of human interaction. But at the core was the feeling of failing at reality, of a diamond hard superstructure crushing what I felt was real. Now that I see that there is only a reality of consensus, a ridiculous web of dependent causality governing behavior, I wonder if there is anything left to fear.

I do not think it is healthy for me to be sane. It is a survival trait necessary for the muggle world, but I fear it may be a cancer of the spirit.

As usual, please comment at the Secure Immaturity site.

I’ve closed comments here to encourage responses at the Secure Immaturity site.

Read it here.

Read it here.

—-

Ever the precocious child, Anton used the teleporter in many ways other than its intended purpose.

Cleaning his room, for example, was a trivial task now that he had a save state for it.

Anton’s meticulously arranged ZOMG!icons vs. Blazaroids diorama could swiftly return to its pristine state after each invasion.

And, with the Doppler circuit he created, Anton no longer had just one Amazium-plated AnnihiLord shock trooper. He had twenty-seven.

Twenty-seven incrementally fragile Amazium-plated AnnihiLord shock troopers, but nevertheless many more than Paige McAllister, who had only three.

Saturday mornings weren’t as fun without his brother Dmitri.

Anton rode the train into the city every afternoon. He inserted the same token each time. Only plebs and precocious children still used the trains.

He sat next to Dmitri’s hospital bed and read his twin the latest manga. He held up the slate so Dmitri could see the explosions.

The hospital staff had seen his father’s movies. They never troubled Anton with questions. They assured him Dmitri would wake up one day.

It would be a few days before they noticed that Anton’s parents had stopped visiting.

His mothers were always in the lab and his father filled the weekends with chute-less skydiving and BASE jumping.

Anton wished they stayed home more often.

Although a bright child for his age, he often lacked common sense, particularly when it came to mass conservation vs. lossy molecular compression algorithms.

The nurse saw Anton showing Dmitri his three new Blazaroid pilot action figures. “How lifelike they are,” she remarked.

Unfortunately, for Anton’s parents, nothing was further from the truth.

The End.

But you still arrive two hours late to all of my parties.

“Not poisoned, Lord, I assure you,” said Maybrick, sad eyes watching the circular bits of pasta slide in the pooling soup. The Lord’s aide towered over the strange throne, at least as tall as the Caretakers. “You must remember I taste all your food and drink beforehand. The soup was savory.”

“Do not patronize me, you faggotty fuck!” Lord Sauding pressed the thumbstick to spin the throne around to face Maybrick. The gears whirred like arguing metal cats and oily smoke coughed from somewhere inside the chassis. Maybrick looked down his slender nose at the furious creature embedded in the wheeled chair. Maybrick waited patiently as his master blinked and sputtered, his mind stooping to collect the scattered leaves of his thought. The Bell’s Palsy had taken residence in the left side of Lord Sauding’s jowly face, the corner of his mouth permanently relaxed. Whenever he spoke, the image of a toad caught on a hook resurfaced in Maybrick’s mind.

“Yes, my Lord?” Maybrick asked, an eyebrow arched.

“I…I want to see Feign,” Lord Sauding said, his bluster gone. His milky blue eyes brimmed with tears. “I want to play with more keys.”

“I shall send for him immediately,” said Maybrick with a gentle nod, causing a cascade of obsidian hair across his high forehead. He looked again at the pool of soup. Odorless, tasteless…a month’s wages wasted! Maybrick nodded to a spindly black figure hanging on the wall. Oubliette lifted herself off the coat hook and scuttled out of the room.

Lord Sauding rubbed his hands, satisfied. He turned a knob on the armrest and sent the throne trundling forward. He liked to orbit the badminton court as he made his kingly pronouncements.

“Now,” asked Lord Sauding, “what is the next order of business?”

Bastian’s hand found some wooden protrusion and steadied himself, and he spat an oily wad of phlegm onto the deck. But he didn’t retch this time. He felt his atrophied skills most profoundly in his limbs, heavy and distant, like a stranger’s. Braced by the brittle sea air, he soon had command of his senses once more. A gull shrieked above him, its wings frozen by memory. Bastian wondered how long it would hang there. Until there is no one left to remember. Or longer.

He turned to face her.

“Oh, you’re not the boatswain,” said Patrice. She twirled a pink parasol over her shoulder as she studied him. Her dress was all layers and lace, a garment unfit for adventures in lonely halls. Bastian’s eyes latched on the satchel dangling at her waist.

“You’re here to trade,” she said, understanding the look. He nodded, “Yes, that’s right.” It was Patrice, but a Patrice that did not know him. Best to get down to it.

“What’ve you got?” she asked, propping the parasol against a tarp-covered crate. Her hair was shorter than he remembered. Bastian walked across the deck, planks creaking underfoot.

“Words, mostly. Good ones, though. I’ve got ‘lame de fond.’ It’s French for…”

“Groundswell. Yes, I know,” Patrice snapped. “Look where you are. We’re lousy with seaman’s tongues.”

“Right, of course,” Bastian rubbed the back of his neck. “Stupid.” He looked out at the ocean. It stretched into forever, turning into a grayish smear on the horizon. A word bloomed and he rapped the crate with his knuckles. “I’ve got one for a Japanese flower.”

Her eyes went wide and nearly snapped his heart in two. “Give it, then!”

“Let’s see yours first!” Bastian tapped the top of the crate, falling back into the groove of his business.

Instead of opening the satchel, Patrice revealed a locket shining at her neck. Bastian felt the cold at the core of the sea flood up into his legs. “I have this. Isn’t it lovely?”

“No,” said Bastian, too loudly. Patrice took a step back, concern in her brow. “No…we deal in keys.” And if you traded that to me I’d never see Patrice again.

She nodded and pulled a ring laden with keys from her satchel. They tinkled and clanked as she fanned them over the tarp. “Here’s one that has ’343′ on it. I’ve got a ’660′ as well…”

“Worthless. No numbers. I want shapes, sigils.” One of his many bitter lessons was that the numbers on the doors were lies.

“What about this one? It looks like a bat.” He could see he had offended her. She wouldn’t look directly at him, finding bits of lint to pick out of her dress. Bastian wanted to apologize, to explain. Instead he nodded, scooping up her offering. It did indeed look like a bat. Patrice blinked, relieved.

Bastian turned to leave and then remembered. “Sakurasou. It means ‘longing’.” Or ‘home’. Patrice smiled quietly, eyes drawn inward to study this new acquisition.

He knew Oubliette would be impatient by now and, his business concluded, he ought to return.

But something suddenly occurred to Bastian.

—-

Bondmistress Oubliette herself had come to find him. The sputtering bulb in the elevator shone through the wide moth eaten brim of her hat, dappling her pale face with sodium-colored light. Of all the caretakers, Bastian considered Oubliette’s face the most well maintained.

Her arm unfolded like a graceful black umbrella, gesturing for him to join her. Wanting to give no cause for suspicion, he immediately stepped into the cab, a space immediately cramped by the bustle of her dress.

Oubliette turned her gaze down upon him, smooth white eyes set in a smooth white face interrupted only by a thin crevice. He heard her scratch and click just under its surface, but the hinges did not move. For a moment Bastian felt the words rise from their hidden place, burning up through his forehead where she could surely read them.

He gulped relief as she looked away, but held his breath as her eyes fell now on the sheet hung on the opposite wall. “See nothing,” he thought at her, as though it might help. “They’re just scribbles.” The Bondmistress did not move. “Her face will open now,” Bastian thought, certain that the scratching in her head had grown agitated.

But then the doors closed and Oubliette’s arms moved absently about, sending the elevator back up.

Pull, spin, step.