The Midnight Dreamers

At dusk the darkness creeps across the destitute canvas of the sickly sky like phantom fingers. The dreamers hold their breath as the dying rays of the incensed orb rapidly fade. Time punctuates every throbbing heart in this era of dread and the chaos of imagination rumbles like thunder in every mind. The children in bed cover their heads with sheets of lead. The cancerous x-rays cascade down from the ionosphere as the last light lingers, but their poisonous tentacles fail to penetrate the cold, heavy blankets tightly wrapped around the younglings. At least they can dream. In a brief reprieve from the sea of misery, their thoughts gently roll amongst fluffy marshmallows for clouds and interlacing rainbows floating in a vibrant stretch of blue. The curiosities of the kids rapidly lead them to beyond the golden horizon and into a world diametrically opposite from their own. There is no poverty of happiness in the direction that they venture toward.

During the daytime, it is a different story altogether. A great sadness deeply saturates the skin of the waking populace, trudging along like zombies from shack to factory, factory to shack, over and over again. There is immense poverty here but also sequestered wealth. At the end days of an industrial revolution, the laborers are merely a step beyond an existence of dismal slavery. There is no savings to look forward to. Only mind-numbing repetition day in and day out. The adults are no longer able to dream. The governing party has driven the populace with an iron fist and dark deception is in abundance of what really happened to cause the sudden and irreversible decay of Earth. The planet's manganese core now emits deadly radiation as the ozone dangles like cob-webs against the thick, polluted atmosphere.

The only hope lies in the minds of the children. They are the future cosmonauts. They will guide humanity out of the misery and into a new dawn. But not on this planet. It's a lost cause for poor, wasted Mother Earth. No, the children's scion will find shelter on the quartz-encrusted heloid satellite of Jupiter, called Ganymede. Of course, they would have to come up with a way of transporting the 1.3 billion cubic kilometers of remaining ocean water of Earth to their new home if they hoped to survive. But survive they would.

The years melt into decades, and then the kids who are no longer children, revolt, and overthrow the oppressive reign of tyrannical rule. A century roles on by and now the kids have developed the appropriate technology to escape from the toxic inferno that has become the planet they deem 'wEarthless.' They cast aside their lead-lined blankets and depart in there floating cities to begin their 26 year journey to Jupiter’s largest moon. For the first time, they find themselves as extraterrestrials sleeping in warm beds with soft, soporific pillows and sheets. They resume their dreaming at night. No longer are their dreams fantasies, but instead, they take the form of ideas and hopes that will help them bring in the dawn of a new age.

Doctor Shnagra Vadlinger IX

THE toxic smoke emitted from the devil pit suffocates the pallid light of the infernal hydrogen orb. It peers down with its billion blinding eyes from a hazy vermillion canvas. The shadows become ever more menacing as they elongate with the departure of the sun. Doctor Shnagra Vadlinger IX pries open his sustenance chamber with his warped claws for hands. The eroded enamel of his jagged teeth appears as cutting devices that some hell-bent assassin might use. The rusty colors of essential fluids cake the bicuspids of his maxilla. If this was his smile, I would hate to see his sneer. 

The burnt floor beneath us shifts under cataclysmic seismic pressures and my feet lose purchase from the wasted earth. Vadlinger IX callously reaches out to envelope me with his many oaken arms and legs on my inevitable return-trip. Then I’m tossed like yesterday’s trash into an ancient midnight-black oblong box. My skull cracks on impact and Sir Homunculus escapes using his tiny malformed legs. I endure a sharp negative 82g free-fall into the devil pit as Vadlinger IX’s heaving belly rhythmically moves in tune to the horrendous cackle of delight, brought on by my timely demise.

In the grey-goose universe of banal bourgeois, I was one of the most maverick of semi-sentient beings. My hallucinogenic and vicarious re-creations of what never was, seemed to pervade my marginally-mundane mind-machinations. For this reason, I was now here: within a Stone Mason’s coffin, with a cracked cranium, and catapulted by Dr. Shagra to beyond the event horizon of the devil pit. There would be no reversal to this fate. No second chances or slow romances neither. I was down for the count and in it for the long haul to do Hades dirty-work.

Iris (part 2)

Iris (part 1) - Click to view


Chapter 5

Time: June 20, 2000

Location: 10 00 N, 49 00 E

The raging riptide sucks them deep into the gaping bowels of the Indian Ocean. Neither Adisa nor Aamir are alarmed, however, for they have prepared for this. They know that the tepid but turbulent water off the coast of Somalia, right outside the city limits of Mogadishu, has a mind of its own. They were, relatively-speaking, safe for they carried with them the most advanced SCUBA equipment the United Nations Aquatic Committee for Free Waters could supply them. What brought them here? What was there latest assignment? This information is at the moment classified, so we find ourselves in the dark. Nonetheless, what we do know is that the two highly-trained Indian Operatives would soon be up to their knees in elephant excrement, figuratively speaking. Yet, the couple was willing to involve themselves in such an affair for it would aid in the liberation of a throng of oppressed Somalians.

For the Somali people, this is a time of dire straights. There is rampant political upheaval and continual famine. The average life expectancy is at the all-time low of 47.3 years. Many are left homeless after the calloused heads of the parliamentary federal government last year decided to leverage Somali housing against acquisition of new technologies to extract uranium beneath the ocean surface. The youth are screened after they are given three years of education beyond elementary school. Those that possess the desired attributes are unceremoniously extracted from society and are relocated into the deep-ocean mining institutes located at the political nexus of Ethiopia, Djibouti, and Somalia. Their training is long and exacting but their incentive for success is great. They are promised that after matriculation and 7 years of indentured service to the government-sanctioned corporation, that their families would be immediately financially-taken-care-of. Those in the ‘know’, aptly name the current government administration ‘Jamhuuriyada Demuqraadiga Soomaaliyeed,’ or ‘Reapers of the Withered Harvest’. But the laborers do what they are trained to do, and they do it well. The net result is that the underwater mountain ranges jutting out of the Indian Ocean’s bathypelagic zone are, in an ongoing basis, purged of its vast quantities of uranium, a.k.a., ‘yellow-cake’, a.k.a, ‘radioactive melt-down sludge’.

Now, as the intrepid couple, Adisa and Aamir find themselves swallowed alive by the ocean, they are preoccupied communicating with each other via their nav-com microphones surgically implanted within one of their molars. On the receiving-end of Adisa’s micro-speakers, implanted in the ancus of her inner ears, she listens to the gentle boo-makudas of her husband. Aamir knows that this lovely Portugese humming pacifies her and keeps her calm at even the most precarious of times, so he never forgets to do so when each mission commences.  “I love you with all my soul,” she coos back.

“We have approximately a half-nautical mile to the Daphshan Ridge and the entrance to the mine,” Aamir tells his pulchritudinous, ultraviolet-eyed wife. Have your thunder-trident ready, darling. Thunder-tridents are depth-charge electron sabers that make use of the increased pressure that builds the deeper in the water one is.  Thus, as an underwater law enforcement ‘nightstick’ of sorts, it is quite effective when used against the skulls of unruly aquatic miners.  Aamir beseeched his god-father Dionysus, via a quick prayer under his breath, that they would not be forced to use their weapons.

Although he possessed a naturally-austere countenance, he was a gentle and compassionate Hindustani at heart. It was for this reason, primarily, that Aamir had found an entrance into Adisa’s heart. From an early age, his Greek father and Gujarati mother taught him to observe both the peacefulness and power that nature could harness. Aamir’s parents owned a little dairy farm where goat’s milk was either collected for personal consumption, or sold to neighbors. He would play with the goats with full affection towards them, and from the goats he learned the concept of innocence. On the other hand, in his gut he had felt the raw surge of violence that Mother Nature would muster on occasion. He had witnessed the destruction of villages and forests alike due to the passing of lightning storms and Class-5 hurricanes. These, he assumed, were the karmic consequence of a lecherous collective consciousness belonging to a nation, or nations, of pleasure-seeking, money-hungry ogres. As he gazed into the eye of Hurricane Gertrude at 1530 on January 16, 1973, an epiphany dawned on him that his life’s purpose was to provide the impetus for a quantum shift in reality for all of humanity. Of course, he would also preoccupy himself with the more mundane of activities such as peace-keeping missions such as the one he was on now.  He did find time to have some semblance of a leisure life, however, and in these free periods he would give his interpretations of Aborigine art through song and dance alongside Adisa. Of her, he had had a premonition that he would meet someone so special that their union would not be subject to the laws of space and time.  And so it was not.

TO BE CONTINUED…

Sally, the sparrow

Ashen grey, the old sparrow spreads her wings and releases the gnarled sycamore branch from which she is perched upon. Airborne, she struggles to rise higher. Finally, she catches a zephyr and gradually floats beyond the silken stratus clouds above the tired Rocky mountains. She sees with wizened eyes a vast landscape of lush greens and muddied browns, home to her ancestors. Old nests cling wistfully to the treetops. Years ago, when she was young she would warble an enchanted tune to elevate the spirits of her flock. Now the old bird has difficulty producing so much as a gentle squock. Yet she flies onward into the blue in search for her final resting place by the sea. 


Dedictated to Sally -
We will miss you

Bridging Sanity with a capital E

Sitting restlessly at the edge of sanity, I stare down the precipice with a hot earthen mug of Folgers coffee in my sweaty palms. My feet just hang there, listless, waiting for the flames to rise out of the gorge and consume my eternal soul. I carefully raise my cup 'o joe up to my muzzle and take a long sniff of the pungent brew. Hints of raspberry, cardamom and white truffle waft up into my inflated nostrils. At that moment, I let out a horrendous cackle! Midnight black vampire bats are startled from their inverted comatose state and with a swoosh, they fly away into the moon's mischievous face. I wonder where I was, where I am, who I am? Why does my head smell like roast pumpkin and beetroot? No time to ponder these nuanced thoughts anyhow. My hind limbs reach out from the crimson red pool of rhubarb soup I'm bathing in and provide my rostrum with a vigorous scratch only to be matched by the fiefdom of Carlighel and the duke's spotted antelope lover. I think to my other self that I must have left the oven on because my lower vertebrae are beginning to feel warm as stewed turnips. Boy George! I can't seem to get the saucy ideas of delightful delicacies out of my crowded cranium! Did I eat after I took the mayor's dog to the carwash? What if it rains tomorrow, and my underpants have not been fully baked? I put them into the oven only 20 minutes ago. Surely they will be done by yesterday's winter solstice! I hock up a ball of fur and this I mat out into a pleasant toupee. Plop! It fits perfectly over my pumpkin head. Sigh! Where did I leave my reason and rationale? Could have been in the bowling alley that I went to two weeks from today.