WOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!
By: Michael James Greenwald
We are bringing a new feature concept, this week, my PLC peeps: Round Robin Fiction, Confessional-style.
Gather around the campfire, skewer a marshmallow on a stick, hold your loved-ones close and get ready for…
Oops. Wrong clip. Wrong genre. ”The wrong night, the wrong road; one wrong turn.” Yeah. Just…wrong.
To catch up on what’s transpired in our round-robin story:
Click here for Amy McLane’s PART ONE.
Click here for Amy K. Nichols PART TWO.
Click here for S.C. Green’s PART THREE.
And without further ado we move to PART FOUR, the dramatic conclusion of the Parking Lot Confessional’s Round Robin Story, “Parlour Games.” (We join the story; already in progress)…
Tensen kept talking as if the words wouldn’t come out fast enough. ”I swallowed it and she waited for me to change. She told me she needed an active pill to turn her back. I started to glow. She pinned me down. I grabbed the plate and it shined too. I swung it at her head. I just wanted her to stop. Not to hurt her. I don’t want to hurt anybody. I caught her head and burst. She fell on me. I pushed and pushed. Something fell from her mouth into mine. I choked, and the green was gone.”
“It’s okay, Tensen.” I tried to move closer again, but she stood up.
“No. It’s not!”
She turned around with a glowing fist-sized stone raised above her head.
“I need my wings, Shishi.”
“But we’re friends!” I scrambled backward across the cobblestone alley, talons tearing up bits and pieces of stone like one of the sentry’s skid loaders, making that horrible scratching sound I’d woken up to that morning, which was really four years, yet seemed like eons ago.
“We have orders to take your house,” the lead sentry had said, not even providing my father the dignity of dismounting from his perch in the cage of the skid loader, just flinging the written documentation at my father, then whistling and yelling, “Let’s go, boys!” to the platoon of skid loaders and cranes and bulldozers lined-up behind him, as my father scrambled for the papers in the dirt.
“But wait!” My father paged through the three stapled pages, but I know he couldn’t read them, not without his seeing glasses. ”You have to let us get our things out.”
My mother, the twins, and me stood about halfway up the driveway as the lead sentry peered at my father so peculiarly you’d have thought my father had asked him for a ride on his back out of the Artificial Levels.
“I don’t have to let you do anything!” the lead sentry roared. He shifted his gaze to his platoon. ”Can you believe the knocks on this Double-Eye?”
“But I work for the government. I’m a scientist.” My father held the pages in the air, shook them, as though the papers somehow justified his claims; and they might have, for all he knew, for all my mother knew, for all the one-eyed sentries knew–the later born without and the former passed the age of natural sight.
“I don’t care if your the cragging Lady Cadbury-Heinz!” said the lead sentry, belly-fat shaking with laughter. All the sentries by this time losing it, one of whom laughed so hard he jammed the shifter on his skid loader and nosed into the dozer. ”Now, look what you’ve done. Get back! Get back!” The lead sentry spit at my father’s feet. My father stumbled backward and the lead sentry spit again, my father backpedaling, lead sentry lofting spit balls, until my father collided with me.
“Ouch.” I clutched at my chest where he’d knocked me.
“I’m sorry,” my father mumbled, putting a hand on my head.
“Onward!” yelled the lead sentry and the platoon of destruction rolled forward.
We stood in our driveway all morning and watched them demolish our house with all our things inside. It wasn’t until the equipment and sentries rode away that my mother began to weep. My father slung his arm around my shoulder, “Oh, it’s going to be all right. Don’t cry, honey, don’t cry.” He held the stapled documents inches from his nose. ”They wouldn’t have done that if we didn’t deserve it.”
A smack to the back of my head drew my concentration back to the present, where I quickly realized my lack of focus and desperate scrambling had led me down an alley with no opening. A dark brick wall stretched higher than I could see. Water dripping from a non-visible ledge into my hair, down the bridge of my nose and over my lips. Some moisture seeped through and tasted foul.
Tensen rounded the corner and her whole bright body flashed brighter when she saw my predicament. She opened her jaws wide and snapped them shut, stepping forward, evidently in no hurry to advance upon me.
I turned to the only rationale I’d thought of so far, bleating out, “But you’re like my best friend!”
“This world won’t suffer friends,” Tensen said, her voice, hollow and dim, as her features were bold and iridescent; nearly beautiful even–if the alley hadn’t reverberated a clanking sound from her gnashing sets of metallic teeth. ”And when I have my wings, I’ll be so famous, everyone will want to be best friends with me!”
“Like Lady Cadbury-Heinz?”
Tensen aura dimmed. ”Don’t you talk about her, Shishi. Don’t even mention her name.”
In the dim-light, I became aware of the walls that surrounded me on three sides. They were stone in some spots but in others I could see brick, sections of which, were decrepit and crumbling. I stared at my chisel-hands. It wouldn’t take much. But Tensen appeared to decipher my thoughts, her body illuminating even brighter and hotter than before. The walls around me faded to black in the glow.
“But that’s what she wanted, wasn’t it? Wings.”
“Shut your mouth.”
“And think of the irony there, too, the woman who merged the two oldest old-money families in the world.” I grinned. I was enjoying this. ”And birthed the brainchild of the Ketchup Cadburry Bunny, too!”
Tensen’s body grew brighter and brighter, her circular aura growing wider, like a green bubble around her, growing and growing, and a voice, no longer recognizable as Tensen’s, deeper, darker, sinister, emitted from her mouth. ”Don’t. You. Say. One. More. Word.”
I thought about shutting up, I did, I swear, but the truth of the matter, the green matter, is I no longer felt much like myself. I didn’t know much about transing. I was a transing virgin up until this afternoon. And I don’t know why I took it. Transing was highly illegal. If caught the punishment was harsh. Tensen told me stories about people she knew, other runaways, addicted transies, who’d gotten caught on the trans by the sentries and been sent away to concentration camps.
Shutting up was certainly in my genetic disposition, but as I clicked my talon-hands together, I didn’t feel much like my father’s daughter anymore. So, I grinned and said, “Yeah, Tennie, I see what you’re saying, cause Lady Cadburry-Heinz was the most famous woman in the world, right?”
Tensen’s orb grew brighter.
“She couldn’t have made up the whole wing theory.”
Brighter.
“She couldn’t have been transed out of her mind and crazy.”
Even brighter.
“There was no way that Lady. Cadburry. Heinz. Was just some scum-sucking transy.”
There was an explosion and a beam of light shot up from the ground like a neon green lightening bolt through Tensen’s body and out the crown of her head. Her limbs jerked horribly, as though skewered on the electric charge, and I smelled a smell like pancake batter; then Tensen’s head snapped so her eyes were facing straight up, and she smiled. I ran my eyes up the beam’s upward trajectory, seeing the green beacon extend into the swirling black clouds of our atmosphere, piercing them, appearing to burn them away in a ten-foot circumference around it, then rising even higher, where the sinister clouds retreated and for the first time in my life, for the first time in anyone’s life that I knew, I could see a blue sky, white clouds, and a sun.
“Beyond A.L,” I whispered, then darted my eyes around, as though wondering who had just said something so insane.
This view sucked the air from my lungs. I’d only heard about Beyond A.L. Bed-time stories my father told me. Someday, honey, you’ll find a way to fly up beyond the pollution, to a world with blue sky, white clouds, and sun, he’d say. When I was a girl I believed him, when he said the man in square caught by the sentries wouldn’t have been taken if he hadn’t deserved it, I believed him. The sentries destroying our house, and our family wandering the country-side, squatting in house-to-house, digging in long-barren fields for morsels of food, began the building of disbelief in my father, in my parents, in all that they promised had once been good and would be again. So much so, that, after months, when we’d finally made it out of the mountains to a shelter for displaced people in the city, I’d waited until the second night, when we’d all laid on our cots to sleep, before rising in the dark to the sound of my father’s snoring, and without hesitation, without a look backward, slipping out into the night, away.
Tensen’s eyes hadn’t left the view of Beyond A.L. ”Isn’t it so pretty?” she gushed, in the little girl voice I’d first heard while scrounging through the scrap pile in the alley behind a butcher shop. ”Isn’t it, ShiShi? Isn’t it just super gorgeous?” Inside the crackling and spitting green orb around her, I saw a fleshy tone return to my friend’s arms and legs and round face, chubby cheeks with the dimples in the middle like two mini belly-buttons on her face. She tilted her head to the front and looked at me through her soft gray eyes. Tears trickled down her cheeks. ”I’m sorry,” she whispered, sounding far-away and frightened.
“I know.” I wanted to hug her, hold her hand even, but with my chisel-hands I’d hurt her, and I was afraid to even touch what could be some kind of electrified force-field surrounding her. ”I’m sorry I said those things about your mom.”
Tensen looked up again. Maybe, a realization settling on her that even if she killed me this would be as close to escaping an Artificial Level as she’d ever be; or, if I were a more optimistic person in this pessimistic world, maybe the realization had to do with what great friends we’d become, meeting on the street, looking out for each other.
Tensen nodded. Agreeing with one of my assumptions, or both? ”She would have really liked to see this.”
“You’re mom?”
“Yeah. She really believed, you know. That the world wasn’t such a bad–”
But the rest of what she said was drowned out by a scratching noise. Distant. Soft. Tensen’s mouth continued to move but all I could hear in my ears was that scratching noise. Coming closer.
“Tensen,” I hissed. ”Shut up.”
She appeared hurt. The green glow around her snapped and spit. From her neck up, her face began to flood green.
“Tensen! No! Stay with me!” I charged toward her. Wielding my chisel-hands like swords, I struck at the green field, but as soon as I touched it, a surge shot up my arms and into my brain, like two ice-picks had been jammed through my skull, and I lofted into the air, staring down at Tensen’s beady-green eyeballs, then I spun in three-hundred-and-sixty degrees and hurtled across the alley, crashing hard into the brick wall. I lay on the stank ground, chips of the wall raining down upon me.
“Never! Touch! Me!” The voice was back. Tensen possessed. My brain felt scrambled. I blinked, but my vision wouldn’t clear; I tasted metal on my tongue. And in the background the constant scratching, getting louder, closer.
“Tensen. Your mother. A.L. Tensen, listen to me! They’re coming. The sentries. Put out your light! Tensen, please, put out your light!”
It was then that inside that green forcefield my fleshy Tensen appeared for the final time. She looked at me like some dumbstruck child. ”But I can’t, Shishinnie-Anne.” She tilted her head and stared up at the path burned through the clouds by her beam of light, into the blue sky and white, wispy clouds and yellow sun of Beyond A.L. ”Isn’t it so pretty?”
In my head I heard my father’s voice: They won’t take you if you don’t deserve it.
A piercing scratch and I saw the auger appear at the end of the alleyway, then one front wheel of the skid loader. I spun away from Tensen, toward the wall, jammed my chisel-talons into the weakened bricks.
And began to dig.
<THE END>
When not biting off more than he can chew, Michael James Greenwald deals with a daily dose of depression by getting dragged (kicking and screaming, people!!!!) into speculative, sci-fi, fantasy fiction. He’s a student at Story Studio Chicago, applying for a Ragdale Residency in the fall, and considering allowing UT, Austin a second chance at deliverance (Corporate-sponsored education institutions here I come!!!), by accepting him into their MFA program for 2011 (HOOK ‘EM HORNS!!).
For now, he works in his family business of owning and operating bowling alleys in the South Suburbs of Chicago. He is also a fiction writer, with a short story collection Stories from a Bowling Alley and a novel The Rainbow Child due to be published in the next several years. You can read his blogs at sleepsunshine and his confessions every Sunday on his group blog at parkinglotconfessional.com. Venture to his Facebook page or feel free to email him with any comments or suggestions for further topics, or if you had any interest in being a guest blogger on either one of his sites.
