Night Owl Stories

A stream of conciousness exercise

2011-07-21T15:32:00.001-04:00

In he midst of the dark heat, the mangrove moves into the boiling rocks. The rocks intrude into his ripples, muscles tensing and sweat wrung from pores aright. In the dark heat no water quenches, the pulls and prods of mad rails increases as the mangrove progresses. The images of past souls intrude in his mind and give strength to the mangrove as he reaches the valley and begins his climax. The place of the dark night is the place of testing, of crucibles and fire untainted. The mangrove sweats toxins and bleeds passion. The place of the heat is the place nearest to his Lord. The breath of the lord makes the hills melt and the presence is so near that all else is obscured, the brightness of the Lord making the eyes see naught in the blaze. The mangrove presses on, the hot wind scours his skin and removes layer after layer of growth, until from the mangrove appears a man, with skin like an infant and tender as the dawn.

Wailing cat heights.

2010-10-15T16:56:00.001-04:00

In the beginning there was no way to determine how the place would respond to the harmonic disturbance caused by the wailing cats. Wailing cat was the nickname given to the sonic emitter designed by Doctor Bryson’s son’s uncle’s dog. Fido had taken a four in copper tube and wrapped it in wire, attaching the motor from an electric mouse play toy and a nine-volt battery. The wailing started small but it got him thinking. Soon he had attached his contraption to the empty plumbing of the vacant house next door. When he powered it on the vibrations created waves in the hardwood floors. Giddy, he created more emitters tying in the faulty wiring and ventilation systems of the old house.

Now here he was, wearing some old brass goggles he found at the junkyard, and his ears stuffed with the contents of three pillows, standing nervously shaking over the ignition switch. “One small step for dog…” he thought as he turned the crank and the vibrations began to crank up. The house became jello. The liquid convulsions of the structure made him want very badly to go for walkies. As he ran out of the house the substance of things seemed to be changing. The wood, while it looked like wood was rippling like water. The concrete blocks seemed to be melting and like sand dunes were piling in strange serpentine waves.

Fido made it out on to the street in time to see the very air making a run for it, tearing leaves from trees and leaving behind a sepia void. On the wave of destruction ran, and Fido ran barely ahead of it. He felt the hair on the tip of his tail flung from its place and he tucked it between his legs as he quickened his pace.

Suddenly he realized that the expanding bubble behind him had stopped. He spun around on the bank of a river to see the results of his handiwork. There behind him the neighborhood had become a large jello salad incased in a round jiggling mold. Creatures far and wide came to eat his hometown. The end.

Moon Fellowship beginnings

2009-06-16T21:28:00.000-04:00

“It’s just not sustainable Ms. Slipstream,” said the dogged Col. Black of the National Aeronautics and Space Agency. “Congress has nixed any attempts at starting a colony on the moon. We cannot do it.”

“Zephyr, Zephyr,” called an excited Charles Halpern as he bounded in to the office. “Oh, excuse me Col. Black, but I have important news. Zephyr,” he continued turning to Zephyr Slipstream the young charismatic coordinator of the Moon Colonization Committee. “Dr. Jameson reports that they have located the perfect location for the colony’s base of operations, he calls it the peak of eternal light. It is a mountain at the north pole of the moon that is almost always in the sun’s light. The solar power would be constant!”

“There you see, Col. It can be done.”

“I’m afraid, that unless your project can serve some military purpose, congress just won’t buy it. We’ve known about the peak of eternal light for some time, but it is beyond the horizon from earth, making it unusable for military application. No, I’m afraid if you want to put a colony up there, you’re going to have to do it on your own.”

“No, not on my own,” Ms. Slipstream, her voice an offering to something bigger, “a group, a fellowship of scientists, explorers, families and worshippers.”

So began the moon fellowship.

Holy Guacamole

2008-01-17T17:56:00.000-05:00

Once upon a time in the Kingdom Ruled by God there was a Happy Happy Princess with a flying horse named Ponya Omonia. One day it was getting to be about lunch time and the people of the land were hungry. They were really hungry in fact because they didn’t eat breakfast.

The food was on top of Mount Barabadu through the underbrush of Scarydipity. There in the underbrush of Scarydipity all manner of creatures lived, snakes, bears, coyotes, cougars, slugs and kitties. It was a frightening place to go. Some of the people of the land ventured in, but soon came running back out, pulling their heads and arms into their shirts like a turtle. The people of the town were so afraid they wouldn’t even look at the mountain, and by lunch time they had forgotten it was there and even forgotten they were hungry.

All that is except for the Happy Happy Princess. She knew God wanted her to eat. She also knew God wanted the people in the kingdom to eat too. She could see them all wandering about town holding tortilla chips, but they didn’t know what to do with them since they had nothing to dip them in.

Just then Ponya Omonia flew by with great news. On the top of Mount Barabadu she saw a great big bowl of Holy Guacamole. All that was left was to climb up the mountain and get it. She couldn’t fly them up because the underbrush of Scarydipity made it too hard to land. So they would have to climb.

The first time they started they reached the underbrush of Scarydipity at the foot of the mountain. They climbed up the first hill and looked down into a gully of tangled brush.
“What animals do you think live down there?” The Happy Happy Princess asked.
They stood there looking afraid to move for a while. Then they heard the voice of God calling, “Come farther in and farther up.”

It was like he was inviting them to the dinner table, his voice was sweet and welcoming. Ponya Omonia gave the Happy Happy Princes a nudge with her muzzle, and up they started climb.

The Happy Happy Princesse Zigged up the side of the mountain. The Happy Happy Princess Zagged up the mountain. Ponya Omonia zagged up the mountain. Ponya Omonia zagged up the mountian. Between stacks of snarled brush they zigged. Up sandy paths they zagged.

“My leggs are getting wobbly,” the Happy Happy Princess declared. Her legs didn’t want to move any more, they didn’t want to go up the mountain. Ponya Omonia looked over the side of the path. It was a long ways down. Her knees started to shake.

God’s voice came again. “Walk fearlessly my princess, Walk fearlessly my Ponya.”

So they stood up again and the looked farther in and farther up. It wasn’t far now. They pushed on. The Happy Happy Princess lifted up her leg and put it down in front of her. She put her hand on her knee and pushed her body up so her other leg came up too. She lifted and push, lifted and pushed.

Ponya Omonia made a steady, hard clop, clip, clop. Some times pushing the Happy Happy Princess up with her nose. For it is not good to climb a mountain alone.

Soon they were at the top of Mount Barabadu their fear was gone, and they hungered for the good things again. The Holy Guacamole was there, Ponya Omonia spread her wings and balanced the great bowl on her back and down the paths they slid.

When they got to the bottom the people at in the town looked up at them. The realized they were holding chips in their hands and looked back at the Guacamole. The surrounded The Happy Happy Princess and Ponya Omonia.

The happy Happy Princess no longer felt wobbly in her legs, the felt strong. Ponya Omonia no longer felt weak in the knees, instead her legs felt powerful. They had climbed Mount Barabadu, they had gone through the underbrush of Scarydipity, the had braved the wild animals, and walked God’s fearless path. They brought down the Holy Guacamole and reminded all the people to hunger for good things.

Hebrews (12:11-14) says:

11Now, discipline always seems painful rather than pleasant at the time, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it.

12 Therefore lift your drooping hands and strengthen your weak knees, 13and make straight paths for your feet, so that what is lame may not be put out of joint, but rather be healed.

Day Two

2007-11-02T23:01:00.000-04:00

Jeff shook himself out of the hold of Daya’s perfume and walked over to the computers to work. He broke out his assignment and tried to put his head together.

Daya walked into her house, and put her books into her room. She lived with her parents in the same house she lived in through high school. She sat down on the couch and turned on TVU Music videos. She curled her legs under her and opened a book. Soon she heard pots and pans rattling in the kitchen as her dad worked to prepare dinner.

“Dad do you need some help?”

“No, Daya,” He replied as a fresh crash interrupted him. “I’ve got it. How does chili sound tonight.”

Chili sounded great, a perfect addition to the fall color, the crisp air and the music of longing souls. The spiciness would awaken her tongue to life and the warmth of the broth would meet the back of her throat and warm the core of her heart. Daya had come to attend to her food, and every part of her life as a revelation of reality. There was a spirituality in food for her and every bite and smell would immerse her in the presence of something bigger than herself, something boundless. The smell of the onions her dad was sautéing entered her awakening her longing glands, a wave of sensuality flooded over her, neck down to her toes like a gentle caress.

Jeff ran from the library back down Norris to the coffee shop he worked at. His legs pumped hard, he had left his studies too late. His head bobbed and his eyes flitted. Between each word something else encroached the folds of his brain, jolting him out of his concentration. He shook his head and broke out of the cycle of thought and dissipation. Thats when he saw the time, and burst from the library.

His breath was coming sharp and his lungs ached from the cold air. His legs throbbed and burned, but he didn’t want to be late again. Only a couple blocks further and his legs were numb to the shock of the footfalls. He burst through back door, shoved his timecard into the slot, washed his hands, doubled over the trash barrel and threw up. He leaned against the wall giving his heart a chance to catch up to his breath. His chest heaved and ached as he went to the drawer and pulled out an apron. Tying it behind his back he walked to the front his forehead cold with sweat. He walked through the counter area and to the cafe not smelling the aromas of the coffee around him. He walked to the bus tub and tables left with their messes without seeing the eye of the people sitting without hearing the music they were listening to. He missed the goose-bumps and the faces glowing with warmth of the music. He missed others indifferent to the music, lost in their love affairs and friends.

Daya’s dad plopped down on the couch next to her with a sigh.

“Got her done?”
“It’s simmering,” he replied as he pushed his glasses up on his face, and ran his hand through his curly hair.

“Long day?”

“Yeah, every day with people, right?”

Daya just smiled. She knew her dad’s work was stressful. She could see on his face the weariness and the strength that he showed.

“Do you miss mom?”

“Of course I do, honey,” he said with a smile, and eyes of compassion.

“Do you think she’ll come home?”

“I don’t know, Daya, I pray that she does every day. I really love her, still.”

“Me too.”

Jeff’s body weighed a ton. His foot fell heavy on the pavement. Every crack caught his toe. He couldn’t seem to lift his foot more than an inch from the ground. A pain stabbed between his shoulder blade. His shoulders stooped and his head swayed bent low as he walked. The pack on his back felt as heavy as the weight on his mind and the lump of despair in his heart. He longed for life, to feel alive and awake, but only felt time slipping through his fingers, his body numb and tired. Even the crisp autumn air felt dull and stifling in his nostrils this night.

Jeff walked though the door of his house, the lights were out. He dropped his bag and called out, “Anyone here?” He flipped the light on.

“Turn that light off, and shut your flap-trap,” his dad growled with a slur.

Jeff caught a glimpse of blood shot watery eyes under a scowl and pulled back. He snapped the light off with an inaudible sorry. He turned around the corner heading for the bathroom and saw his mother sitting on the edge of her bed, her eyes were dark and sunken. Her cheeks stained with tears and mascara. He turned in to the bathroom and sat in the dark closed his eyes on the world and listened to the sounds of his families despair in the silence. He heard the soft heaving of his mother’s sobs. She’s at it again, he thought. She never seems to have anything to cry about and yet she spends all her time either in bed or crying. Then his ears perceived deeper into the silence the rough snoring of his dad on the couch in the next room. Then deeper still he heard the scratching of dead leaves across the street. All was quiet, empty and dead. His ears grew accustomed to the silence like nocturnal eyes on a moonless night, when an explosion overcame him, like a blinding headlights, his straining ears were overwrought and his whole scull rang with the sound. He jumped. His dad snorteld and shouted shrilly, “Shut off that damn noise!”

Slowly he came to realize that his phone was ringing.

“Hey man! There’s a party at Rotters field, you in?”

Jeff thought for a moment. He felt his numb body and listened to the silence of despair, the cacophony of emptiness around his house.

“Yeah, if you come get me. I’m in.”

Minuets later the tires of a 78 pinto was squealing its tires away from Jeff’s house. The field was lit with the headlights from a dozen cars. A bonfire lit the center.

day one

2007-11-01T23:01:00.000-04:00

The terror alert level was raised to red today with the statement from the president indicating a terror network has been found within the border’s of our county,

“My Fellow americans, this threat has been around us and growing in strength for some time. Only recently have we understood the organization’s goals to undermine the systems that govern our nation and our world. That is why the department of homeland security has labeled this organization a terrorist organization. Rest assured…

Jeff turned off the T.V. And headed for the door, his peanut butter sandwich sticking to the roof of his mouth. He shouldered his bag and stepped lightly down the sidewalk. The blue sky and chirping birds spoke nothing of red terror alert levels, or new fears to beware. If Jeff was wary of anything it was the constant implication that he should be afraid. He wanted to live his life, experience life, seize life, not cower in fear from it. He was in the prime of hie days, the well spring of his life.

His foot falls echoed softly off the concrete. He ducked under a low hanging branch as he worked his way on. To the library and then on to the coffeehouse for work. He had his homework and that exam in freshman comp to study for. He turn up Norris with its row of trees marking the median, walking past the house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, the corner touched by modernism in this small town.

As Jeff walked into the library he bumped into a girl from the community college checking out her books. Daya had caught his eye in class before, and meeting her here so abruptly caused a jolt in his spleen. He often stared at the gentle curve to her neck as he sat behind her in biology, Her neck was steeled against the chill November air by a turtleneck, which hugged the rest of her and kept her quite warm. Her hair was up in the back as usual and Jeff stared at the wisps of dark hair that had fallen down around her ears.

How Deep?

2007-07-20T12:54:00.001-04:00

A government Ion-Craft set down in front of a building with title Gnomon Research Laboratories. A man in a suit and a panama hat strode up marble stairs. Whistling, he held the door for a woman in a dark blue pencil skirt that traced her curves, her dark hair up in an array of gossamer spikes. She paused in the door, her youthful face turning slowly toward him. Her eyes turned up and right to look at him and her brows shot quickly to their apex. He got the message and let his whistle slide down the scale as it dropped out of existence.

“More old-timey music?”

“You know music is the soul’s search for freedom, Ella.”

She just shook her head at the thought of freedom in this line of work.

On the 26th floor of the laboratories the debonair blue-suited DSC man picked up a blinking object and turned it over looking at it. “What did you say Dr. Whitney was working on?” Wallace asked the white lab coat in front of him.

“I didn’t—Mr. Wallace was it?” the tech said as he took the object from the agent’s hand. “His work is confidential.”

“What is it that Gnomon does in general?” Forrester asked.

“We are in time. Atomic clocks and the like,” the tech answered.

Wallace looked around at the various digital clock faces on the walls and nodded with a raised eyebrow.

“And what do you make of this?” Wallace asked pulling a pair of goggles from his breast pocket.

“The prototype—where did you get that?” shocked, he reaching for the goggles.

“Hold on there, buckwheat. This is evidence,” Wallace warned, pulling back.

“At least keep it in this,” the tech sighed, agitated, as he placed a metal suitcase on the table. It opened with a gasp. Inside was a molded pad that held the goggles perfectly in controlled humidity and temperature. When Wallace placed the goggles inside, the case sealed with a magnetic hum.

“What do the goggles do?” Wallace didn’t expect the tech to be forthcoming. He watched, with unavoidable revolting, the fleck of spit at the corner of the tech’s overly large and glistening lips. Some how those shiny lips wouldn’t let him go as he waited for them to part and answer his question. They made him more and more agitated. Wallace hated loosing his hard-won cool.

“Why so surprised to see them?” Forrester followed up.

“The prototype was stolen from the lab vaults two weeks ago.”

“Why didn’t you notify the Corps of the theft?”

The tech’s eyes bulged at something on the desk, as if to tell the agents that that speck was absorbing more of his attention than he would give them.

“Do you know why anyone would want to hurt Dr. Whitney?” Wallace asked.

The tech shook his head. Shrugging off any feeling of concern, he looked as disinterested and detached as possible. “Now if you’ll excuse me.”

“I don’t like that guy,” Forrester said. “He is hiding something.”

“He’s hiding more than that,” Wallace said, looking at his pad. “Gnomon is classified G12.”

“Government research?”

“Yeah… Who knows how deep this could go? We may have more than we can chew here. Let’s check on the Ion-craft diagnostic.”

Ion-Craft Corp. was the world leader in Ionic shield vehicles. It was to Ions what Kleenex is to tissue. They were headquartered in a sleek building near Chicago. The two Corps agents wasted no time in arriving. They made their way to the all too familiar test facility.

“Jose, my friend, what do you make of the mystery Ion?”

“I don’t know, Eric. It looks flawless, or at least as flawless as you’d expect after becoming part of the Iowa landscape…. One odd thing, though: the craft’s chronometer is off a few hundredths of a second.”

“Doesn’t sound like much,” Wallace replied.

“It’s a whole hell of a lot when you consider that it is atomic.”

“Let me guess. Gnomon Labs?”

“Yeah… Oh-oh here comes the boss.”

“Wallace!” A sizeable man yelled as he waddled across the floor. His hair was slick and his cloths were as loud as his gruff voice.

“Bustamonte. What a pleasant surprise.”

“Pleasant my sweet behind! You know damn well that we have not had any fatalities since we introduced the Emergency Stasis Restraint system twenty years ago. What is the meaning of sending us this crapper?” Bustamonte jutted a cigar stub at the pile of twisted metal that was once the curved and shapely craft of Dr. Whitney.

“You know how it is, Bustamonte. Just have to rule out the global corporate giant as a murder suspect.”

“Murder? See, I knew it wasn’t our system that killed the man.”

“We’ll see,” Forrester said under her breath.

“Let me know if you find anything else, Jose,” Wallace said quietly as Bustamonte was walking away.

“You bet, Eric.”

***

Wallace put his panama on the hat tree in the corner of the office and sauntered to the banker’s box filled with the contents of Whitney’s car. Wallace riffled through the box; he found an empty coffee cup. Smelling it, he determined it was a cappuccino—dry, double. He picked up a gum wrapper.

“Probably chewed it after the coffee,” his young partner Ella Forrester offered, walking in the room. Though strikingly beautiful, behind glasses her eyes shone with the light of wisdom gained through fire.

“Not a chance,” Wallace responded waving the cup. “A man who orders his cappuccino dry would never follow it up with sweets.”

He picked up a black hardbound pocket-sized book; undoing the elastic clasp he flipped through pages of sketches and formulas.

“A Moleskine,” he explained. “Hemmingway carried one for his notes.”

“What are all those drawings?”

“Scribbling… there seems to be no logic to it,” He replied.

Then he turned to the back cover. There was a pocket there, and hidden within was a sketch of the archaic goggles that the doctor was wearing when he was found.

***

Hours later, Eric silently glided the Ion-Craft out of the Domestic Security Corps’ parking garage, floating a few inches above the pavement. Ella sat in thought looking out the passenger window. She watched the curves of the craft’s fenders, hood, and roof rise and fall in the reflection of other crafts they passed. Soon they cleared the garage doors on the upper level. The craft began to rise high above the city streets crowded with pedestrians wearing hats, their collars turned up against the wind.

Quickly the oblivious masses became part of the street, and the street part of a block as the city became skyline and flashing lights. The craft leveled its ascent and settled into a flight plan cleared with Central, to not interupt another Ion’s path. As the craft picked up speed the silence in the cabin was replaced by wind whistling over the form. Ella watched wisps of cloud swirl off the round fender. Eric had turned on the radio. He was tapped his hands on the steering wheel while singing along to “In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening” trying to get Ella to join in. She just laughed.

They traveled swiftly; plains of harvested fields gave way to rolling hills and farmland again. Though they only slowed slightly over the small towns Ella looked down on them with a smile. The rooftops of the downtown were painted with scenes from the town, trying to attract visitors. Here a rolling river framed with sidewalks and bridges with men and fishing poles. There the image of store fronts lined with smooth rounded Ions. A man sweeping his stoop. Children riding bikes on the walks. The rooftops spoke the good life of the people below with an invitation to join them for an afternoon. A few swift moving commuters had evidently set down at a local diner—one man in the parking lot waving his hat to another coming near.

It wasn’t long before that scene receded behind them and Ella joined Eric in his crooning.

The day had turned cold; a fresh air blew across a field, the amber grain rustling to an unseen presence. Jose Gerrera stood at a gravel crossroads leaning against his 1925 Cord waiting, taking in the breeze.

From the west he saw a glint and a silhouette. He straightened and peered trying to identify the approaching craft, the evening sun in his eyes. The doors opened and Wallace and Forrester found him in his uneasy stance. He relaxed back into his car.

“What have you got Jose?” Wallace asked.

“Time…” Jose said with a smirk. “I ran the chronometric readings from the Ion-Craft fleet and found that there were hundreds of Ions with chronometers off by seconds, even minutes.”

“I wonder why.” Wallace hummed.

“I thought you’d be wondering. So I did a little checking.” Wallace gave a smile and a wink. Jose continued, “I Googled the Ion-Craft computers and decrypted some interesting communiqués between Bustamonte and a certain lab tech at Gnomon labs-name of Clark. It seems the result was a tweak to the Ion-Craft GPS system, which reroutes thousands of commuters through a 100 acre space on the Missouri river.”

Wallace looked at Ella and found her eyes mirrored his look of concern.

“Eric?” Jose questioned his friend’s glance. After a pause he continued, “Well, I don’t know what to make of it, but I’m sure the intel is in good hands.”

“Yes,” Wallace responded, “and we’d better get back to Gnomon labs. Thank you, my friend.”

***

Wallace and Forrester took up position in front of the Gnomon labs building. The postmodern architecture illuminated in the darkness of the cool night. The agents sat in the darkness of their voluptuous Ion-craft, sipping coffee and occasionally checking on their surveillance equipment.

“The real question is how far up the lader does this go? That question crops up in any good investigation. Is there more than we can see?” Wallace plied to his young partner.

“Eric, do you ever wonder if there is more to life than this?”

“Than what El?”

“I don’t know, stakeouts and conspiracy?”

“Ella! Don’t you have enough mystery in your life?” Wallace scolded. “Take this place: classified G12. Here we are digging in where we don’t belong, uncovering the hidden mysteries of our time, and you want more?”

“Absolutely. Facing this stuff all the time forces me to think beyond the mundane routine the rest of the world faces.”

“You’ll grow out of it the longer you stay in this business,” Wallace said with a quizzical smile. “I’m going to have to stop taking you to the country. You always come back romantic.”

“Doesn’t it do anything to you? Don’t the flowers and grain and sky make you feel a part of something bigger?”

Eric looked into her eyes, finding there a life and depth he found attractive. His mind went back to days as a boy when he felt that kind of unlimited presence. Suddenly he was aware that his eyes were betraying his thoughts and he laughed it off. Returning to the surveillance there was, for a moment, silence.

“Justice,” Wallace said with enigmatic significance.

Ella waited for him to continue. “Justice?…”

“I guess that is where I feel most connected with something bigger than myself. That is why I started this job, but the Domestic Security Corps has less to do with correcting injustice than I had imagined in my more sentimental days.”

Ella returned her gaze out the windshield and smiled. After a moment of quiet reflection, her expression changed, “Oh-oh, look who we have here.”

She nodded toward a large figure waddling to the corner of the street. The man took off his fedora and waved it stealthily as he wiped his sweat drenched face. Out of the bushes came a man with slick hair parted in the middle, thick round glasses and a full-length double-breasted white lab coat that gave him the look of a mad scientist from a B-movie. It was the same tech they had met earlier. They listened.

“I told you not to come here.”

“I don’t take orders, Clark. I told you that when you offered our… partnership,” Bustamonte retorted. “Someone hacked the system, email isn’t safe.”

“Relax, we’re on track. Just stay calm. We have to be in for the long haul for this to work.”

“I don’t know if you have the cahones, Clark. You worry me. Are you sure your experiment isn’t going to be discovered?”

Clark stung from the condescension. “None of us wants that Bustamonte. Time isn’t something to play with, if the company found out that I was making something on the side by revealing secrets to a slime such as yourself, they would hurt you more than me.”

Bustamonte’s red face was stopped short when he saw two figures approaching. The silhouette of a man wearing a hat, light glinting from polished toes, and the curves of a woman’s dress, her hair creating a halo around her head, held pistols toward the two men.

***

“What are you getting from Gnomon labs Bustamonte?” Wallace questioned the man in a white room of blazing lights; his double-breasted blue suit and white carnation contrasting the captive’s disheveled clothes and nervous pallor. “We know you have been trafficking in classified information. That is a felony. A good prosecutor could make a case for treason. You had better start singing… Come on! How deep does this go?”

Bustamonte rested a sweaty brow in his hands and slumped, silent.

In another room, Ella Forrester’s eyes shone behind lenses illuminated by the bright lights.

“You weren’t forthcoming with us, Mr. Clark. It seems Bustamonte knows more classified information about Gnomon than we do. You will both rot for a long time, or worse.”

Clark let a nervous titter escape.

“Treason is nothing to laugh off, Clark.”

“It’s not that Agent Forrester. I’m willing to roll on that pig, Bustamonte. That is the word isn’t it? No matter. Bustamonte intimidated me into giving him any advantage. We arranged for thousands of commuters to pass through a Gnomon test area that is hidden.”

“Hidden?” Forrester repeated with a raised eyebrow.

“Yes, it works by… let us just say, it bends time.”

“What would Bustamonte get out of it?”

“Each pass through the area would alter a Ion-craft’s chronometer. Over the course of a few years he would stand to make extra millions on early returns and maintenance. The impression on the stock holders was worth his compensating me handsomely.”

“Sound’s pretty damning for Bustamonte,” Forrester observed. “I have a feeling you are not so innocent, and the prosecutor puts a lot of weight into our report. I can make it go easy on you, or hard. Perhaps you can make a better impression yet.”

“How?”

“Tell me how you and Bustamonte murdered Doctor Whitney.”

“I don’t know… I mean we didn’t… I didn’t.”

“That is not a better impression.” Ella rose putting her papers in her folder.

“Wait… Wait, I’ll help you with your investigation—I can tell you what he was working on!”

Ella smiled and walked out of the room.

***

"Take me to Dr. Whitney's things," Clark, still arrogant, demanded.

"Not a chance," Wallace replied pulling from his breast pocket the moleskine Dr. Whitney used, a foil gum wrapper marking a page. "What do you make of this?"

Thumbing through the book Clark looked puzzled and a little angry. "Gibberish!" he exclaimed. "This is the only thing I can read."

He pointed to a Greek word. "anaximander." Wallace looked at Forrester who adjusted her glasses and after a moment replied, "Anaximander."

Clark took the foil up in his hands, turning it around, staring at it while the two agents talked.

"He was a presocratic philosopher," Ella said quietly.

Wallace cocked his head, his left eye asked “How do you know stuff like that?” his right, “Can you tell me more?”

"Well, he was a mathematician. He developed the sundial. He was also known for looking for the unified field theory of the sixth century BCE, the origin of the elements."

Again his eye brows asked how do you know this stuff? "What could that possibly have to do with this twenty-first century murder? Could Anaximander be an alias for someone?" Suddenly Wallace jumped at Clark. "What did you do with that gum wrapper?"

"Nothing," Clark replied, thrusting his hands in his pocket. Slowly he withdrew them, "I must have absentmindedly put it in my pocket. Tell me, is it yours or was it Dr. Whitney's?"

"It was his. There must have been a dozen of them in his car," Forrester answered.

Clark's eyes widened and then he made a conscious effort to put on what he thought was a poker face. "Ah, so that is where you got the goggles? Dr. Whiney had them?"

"Care to share what you know?" Wallace asked.

"I suppose you'll find out soon enough on your own. The goggles are designed to see through the loosely bound particles that make up matter. Only Dr. Whitney knows how they work, some how they create a field that bends time and isolates the particles, something to do with the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Like I said, I don't know the science behind it, no one in this world does now."

"Didn't he leave any notes behind?" Forrester probed.

"Just this … Gibberish!" Clark growled.

"What does this have to do with that gum wrapper?"

"This, agent Wallace, is the first thing goggles could see through. It dissolved into a dull glow and our protective gloves became visible. Whitney always dreamed of taking the device out side and looking through organic material, but removing it was impossible."

"Apparently not," Wallace replied, and they left an agitated and quiet Clark in the interrogation room.

***

The night had emptied out the Midwest branch office of the Domestic Security Corps. Hallways were dark save the security lamps illuminating deco pillars up and down the hall. High celings stretched in repeating arcs of brass and steel. A walkway of steel adorned with many carvings and a mohogany railing connected second floor walkways. The marbled floors carried a herringbone pattern inlayed with thin steel lines. The pillars made up of a dozen smaller pillars joined block designs inlayed in the wall creating stairsteps topped with a deeply stained trianglular marquee. Through glass doors framed in brushed brass, a partly lit library with mahogany bookcases was home to the coffee and fatigue of agents Wallace and Forrester.

Eric Wallace growled as he looked up from a file rubbing his eyes. "Where are we?"

"Somewhere around square one," Ella replied without looking up from her stack.

Eric looked across the table at his colleague, tracing the curve of her jaw and neck with his eyes. Sitting back he asked "still nothing on this Anaximander?"

"No, Eric," she said suddenly looking up. "I've been thinking… maybe he was referring to the historical Anaximander."

Her enthusiasm and the light dancing in her eyes gave her such a powerful sincerity that Eric had to catch his breath. "How so?"

"Anaximander paints this image of the reality we know: the world, matter, everything, floating as a crust on an infinite sea he named the boundless. He called the true work of philosophy ‘seeing through the surface.’"

"So maybe Anaximander was Dr. Whitney's inspiration?"

"Maybe… Here is something you can relate to," Ella said with a coy smile. "The reason Anaximander looked for a boundless to be the source of everything is that if everything were made of just one of the elements, say water, it would mean that the world was founded on injustice. There had to be something greater, more primary behind it all."

"You thinking I’m more than meets the eye? That there is something more primary behind me?" Eric chuckled. "Now you really are getting out of your field of study. You know I pulled your file…"

"Is that supposed to surprise me?"

"I guess I can’t resist a mystery. Why did you do it Ella? Why join DSC anyway. You have a doctorate in Philosophy and another in Mathematics, and here you are playing damn, good detective."

"If you read my file you know the answer." Ella's voice held a tension that cooled their playful mood.

"I know you lost your dad in the Omaha bombing, but this is no place to get closure. You're smart enough to know that."

She twisted a smile, the light in her eyes retreating behind a cloud of some untold end-game. "I have my reasons," she said with a sigh throwing her head back. She stretched and took her hair down. "Lets get back to work."

She stood over Wallace's shoulder as they perused again the Moleskine of sketches.

***

Wallace’s mind rushed with memory, processed through the filter of a dream.

“Is the scene preserved?”

The policeman gave a nod.

Walking over to the investigators, Wallace strapped into one of their climbing harnesses and, with a quick “on-belay,” he was over the edge.

The wreck of the magnetic flying car was some twenty feet from the top of the bluff; the rushing Missouri was another thirty feet below that. He felt his stomach jump as he repelled down the rope at a quick clip, and stopping short he found himself face to face with the mysterious Dr. Ambrose Whitney. He was the first to see the doctor’s form in the driver’s seat of the crumpled mag-craft. The restraint system had deployed, leaving the doctor, several gum wrappers, some papers and a coffee cup deprived of inertia, suspened in mid air. The crash should not have harmed Whitney’s body.

His face was frozen in a look of wonder. There was a red glow to his cheeks, and his agape mouth turned up at the corners. The restraint system had stopped a single tear rolling down his cheek. Over his eyes were goggles— dark round lenses sheathed in brown leather.

Wallace was the first to deactivate the restraint system releasing all the evidence to laws of thermodynamics. Before deactivation, the computer in his carnation recorded the crash data and position of all the evidence in a three-dimensional rendering. Dr. Whitney’s body slumped forward when it was released from its suspended animation.

Wallace quickly felt for a pulse. The doctor’s heart, when stasis was deactivated, raced for a few seconds before stopping suddenly. He was dead.

Beep-Beep, Beep-Beep. The sound of the notepad’s red flashing indicator awoke Agent Forrester. She had fallen asleep, her head rested on her arm sprawled across the table. Wallace was on the rich leather of the couch, shoes kicked off, tie undone, collar open and white panama over his face.

Ella turned and whispered, "Eric, we have something."

***

Wallace, arrayed in a fresh suit, burst into the holding cell of the sleeping Gnomon lab tech throwing over a chair. Forrester also followed, fresh faced.

"You've been less than candid, Clark!" Wallace punched the words into the air.

"Gnomon labs sent over your computer contents," Forrester chimed in.

"Seems once they learned what you have been up to, they were more than happy to cooperate."

"Especially when they found that your work was simply the ravings of a mad man," the beautiful Forrester laughed in his face. "You crept your way into real scientists confidences so that you would have something to talk about. Does it make you feel important? Knowing all those secrets?"

"No, you just like wearing the lab coat. Isn't that right Clark?"

"No, No. I was Dr. Whitney's right hand man. I was his inspiration. He couldn't have done it with out me."

"I don't see it," Wallace said. "The good doctor did all he could do to get you transferred or fired, didn't he?"

"No! He needed me. He would never…"

"We found memos on your computer that you intercepted to save your own ass," Forrester lashed.

"I did that for him. He couldn't go on with out me. I am Anaximander. I am his Anaximander!"

"You'd like to think that wouldn't you? You’re pathetic," Wallace turned a disgusted face.

"That's what Whitney told you isn't it?" Forrester said coolly.

"Is that why you killed him?"

"No! No." Clark, shaken, sat sobbing, quieting as the moments went by. "I needed him. I needed the goggles. When he crashed I knew my life was over."

"Who were you scared of? Bustamonte?"

"No, these men are dangerous. Terrorists the lot of them. I knew they would kill me soon and that my life was worthless. That is why I came clean about Bustamonte."

"Not clean enough."

Ella followed Eric out the door. “What do you make of Clark’s story, Eric?”

“What I want to know is why Doctor Whitney would have piloted his craft directly into the bluff face.”

“If he were using the goggles, maybe he saw something through the bluff. Could he have been trying to fly into the hidden Gnomon facility?”

“No, it’s a good half mile down river. Could he have seen Clark’s terrorists in the bluff somewhere?”

“Did he even know about them, Eric?”

“Why else would he have taken the goggles? Perhaps if we could answer the age old question…”

“I know, how deep does it go?” Ella teased.

“Two things are clear to me. One, we should send Clark down to Hopper in anti-terrorism; and two, we have to see what Whitney was looking at.”

***

A cold rain fell. Wallace adjusted his panama as he stepped from his craft onto the bank of the Missouri facing the crash site. Forrester walked around the car, standing in contact with him, coveting his warmth. She pulled the collar of her jacket up around her cheeks.

Wallace put the stainless case on the hood and pressed the release buttons. The case opened with a gasp as the electric hum stopped. Carefully he lifted the goggles from their housing. He handed his hat to Forrester and situated the goggles on his face.

“The recorder is on,” Forrester announced. “Special agents, Eric Wallace and Ella Forrester. Case number 7272144, regarding goggle test at Whitney crash site. Agent Wallace testing; Agent Forrester, reporting.” As Ella dictated the information to the recorder, Eric turned the goggles on. All that he saw he dutifully reported to Ella and the record.

When he powered the goggles the gray landscape, yellowed by the tint of the lenses, burst into color. Greens were vivid. Bluff walls glowed with reds and browns. Raindrops became crystalline wonders. Eric’s breathing slowed and shifted draw from his nose to his lips.

“I am now adjusting the goggles to the setting we found them at on Dr. Whitney.”

The raindrops dissolved into a crystalline glow that served to shed light on the rest of the scene, enhancing the colors to ever increasing reality and life. Next the green of the grass dissolved away, revealing in living detail the soil, stone and bedrock beneath. Each layer gave way, enhancing the beauty of the next. The layers continued to melt away, until earth gave way to sky, sky to space, and space dissolved into a brightness that at first was blinding.

Eric blinked his eyes trying to adjust to the light. What could Dr. Whitney have possibly been trying to see? No bunkers, no tunnels, no secret labs, instead he was gazing beyond galaxy and universe.

“It is beautiful,” Wallace announced. His eyes no longer served him, but he felt. He felt with new senses that filled in the void in his mind. Slowly he turned looking around. “It is all around me a sea, an infinite ocean.”

“The boundless… I think you are seeing through to the boundless.”

Eric could feel his heart rate slowing and his natural senses were lost to him as he began feeling and seeing with new senses. He became aware of his own body and soul. He felt the sea, the ocean around him, teaming with life. Never was anything more real to him.

Wave after wave broke over his body and with it he felt the life enter him. His body felt strong his soul became just as real.

“Oh—Ella… love… live…l---.”

Ella watched him as his breath became shallow and his descriptions became labored, she watched him search for words language to express what he saw. She raised her hand to his flushed face now wet with tears. She touched his lips trying to quiet him. He relaxed and his disjointed rants became a song without words.

Her chin began to quiver. Something about his song pierced her soul she thought of her father, but for the first time in years the image was not his screaming face in the midst of an explosion, but of a lullaby. He seemed present. The life Wallace was describing to her was invading her through his song. It was familiar; her father was in that life, in that song.

Wallace was being overwhelmed by the beauty and power of life found in the boundless. His body began to quake. He felt as though he was falling, then he saw Ella’s beautiful face. He didn’t realize that she had pulled goggles from his face. His senses were all still heightened and her beauty struck him, as it never had before. He smiled, completely at peace.

Ella looked at his eyes; they seemed to be gazing through her. One rain drop splashed on his cheek cooling his tears, then another. She felt for a pulse, there was none. She lifted his head and pressed her lips to his, feeling a residue of the song of life he sang.

“Case file closed. No question what happened now,” she absently announced to the recorder through deep breaths. Her shaking hand reached her communicator. “Agent down…”

As she looked at his face, felt the life of the boundless on her lips, all the anger, bitterness and disappointment drained from her body. She felt her father and forgot her end game. With one hand she held Eric’s head, with the other she caressed his chest, and then removed her glasses. Slowly, and with breathless anticipation, she pulled the goggles over her head.

The History of Ponya Omonya

2006-07-17T21:07:00.000-04:00

By Chris Hooton, as told by Ella Hooton

Once upon a time in the beautiful kingdom ruled by the sweet princess Ella, a most amaizing thing happend. Ella wasn't feeling well. She was lonely, so lonely she thougth she would die. She went to the Royal Doctor, and while there, outside the window she caught a glimps of something beautiful and strange.

The train was pulling into the station. A beautiful black streamlined steam engine, pulling car after car of passangers. That was not what caught Ella's eye. Something red streaked by. On the top of train, braced against the wind, red main fluttering, stood a beautiful white pony, her muscles ripling under shiny skin.

She left the doctor's waiting room, and peered around the corner. The horse was gone. Passangers were beginning to file off the train. She ran down the platform, catching quick looks between the cars as she went. No sign of the horse. Se stopped and rested against a lamp post. She looked up between the gas lamps she saw the mighty legs of the white horse, then the belly, hind legs and finally the tail sailed over her. The horse set down lightly with a bright clop-clop and shook her head at Ella over her wings.

"Wings!" Ella thought. "What a beautiful creature. I will name you Ponya Omonya, for you are the fairest pony I have every seen."
She touched Ponya's long white face. The horse whinnied her aproval shaking her long mane, red as burgundy wine.

Princess Ella climbed on Ponya's back. The ribbons atop her cone shaped hat fluttered in the wind just like Ponya Omonya's mane. With one mighty thrust they were in the air. Higher they soured under Ponya's strong wings. They looked down on Ella's garden full of beautiful flowers and broccoli. They circled the castle tower, but Ella urged her on. There was no one there, she lived there alone with stuffed animals and toys, and books.

Ponya seemed to know where to take Ella. She flew long, and hard, and gracefully, over rivers, over forests, over lakes and seas. She flew high over towns sparkling in the dusk. Ella could see a train chugging along slowly underneath them.

Soon they began to decend. She knew the place. It wasn't her kingdom, but it was familiar. Ponya lighted on the cobblestone infront of a little house.
"Grandma! Grandpa!" Ella yelled as she rushed to the house. Ella wasn't lonely any more.

Sheep pen

2006-05-07T16:25:00.000-04:00

Green slopes ran gently and rolling to the waves of a swift river.   The river separated two lands.  Across the river from the green hills was a parched land. Harsh rocks and cliff faces gave way to parched, cracked clay.  On the greener side, a flock of sheep was grazing.

Running from over a green slope, came the twin lams of Friesia.  They chased, bumped and rolled over each other under Friesia’s watchful eyes as she nibbled at a tuft of grass.  Over knoll and dale, the twins ran, until hitting the bank of the river. They stopped to drink.  One lapped at the river while the other nipped at his brother’s tail.
As they looked up across the river, to the rocky shore, they saw something or, someone. Startled the two young lambs ran back.
“Mamma! Mamma!” they cried. “Something’s down by the river.”
“Come, Little ones,” she said. “We must tell Booroola.”
Booroola was talking quietly with Rambouillet when Friesia approached, her two lambs hiding behind her. Booroola was a large wise old ram.  His horns curled around the sides of his head from under a curly cap.  His white face ended in a wide smooth mouth.  He was the Elder of the flock.  Rambouillet’s slender face was the mark of intelligence. He served a second in the Flock.
Booroola slowly looked up at Friesia.
“The twins have something to tell you, Booroola.  Go ahead.”
“Elder Booroola,” one said with a stammer.
“We saw something down by the river,” joined the other.
“Indeed?” Booroola replied. “Come Rambouillet. Let us go see.”
Over the last rise, they came with pedantic stride and sharp eye.  Across the river they saw a pair of shivering dwarf sheep, their long wispy hair blowing in the breeze, they bleated with terror hunger and want.
Booroola’s eyes widened.  He lifted his head stretching his three chins to the air. The twins knew this meant that the Elder was in thought.
“We must help them,” he said at last turning to Rambouillet.  “They may join our fold.”

Rambouillet turned an indifferent eye. For weeks now the flock had been alone.  The shepherd had led them out of the sheep pen to find them food.   The life of the village depended on it – depended on him.  At home he left his wife and children defenseless in order to defend the sheep of the village.
The morning was cold – but soon the sun would rise and the heat would become unbearable in the parched land. The shepherd stood at the door of the gate and sang to the sheep.  His sheep knew his voice.  There were other sheep there too.  Their shepherds would be responsible to care for them, but the sheep of the fold heard the gentle song of the their master and followed him out.
He sang of their need to cross the river and find pasture and safety. He sang of his love for them and his readiness to lay down his life for them.
Rambouillet could still hear the song in his ears. He could still remember the shepherd sweaty and ragged.  He hadn’t eaten in days – instead he gave his food to the sheep.  At the bank of the river, at a shallow spot, it happened. The shepherd herded the flock across the river when a pack of wolves attacked. He fought them off as they swam to safety. They could hear him breathlessly singing his song – that he would lay down his life, until it was over.
Rambouillet remembered these deeds of heroism. He remembered tenderly his master’s voice and his sadness at his loss. But he, and his flock, had to live. They had to make it back to the sheep pen.
Wise old Booroola had reminded them that the shepherd was a sheep too.  He explained that as the shepherd had led them out calling them with his song, the creator had sung to the shepherd and called him home.  He urged them to continue to follow the shepherd’s song – to love the flock, to take the action the shepherd had taken for them, to find the other flocks that belonged to the shepherd and bring them into the fold.
Rambouillet and others loved being a part of the fold and like the good words of Booroola, but soon they went back to the daily sheep life, concerning themselves with feeding.
Some Hampshires and Suffolk sheep didn’t trust that the creator, who let their shepherd die, would take care of them.  They took to carrying haystacks on their backs, matted in their wool, rotting when it got wet.
Booroola saw the indifferent look in the eyes of his friend and in his aged wisdom knew his thoughts.
“We are tired my friend,” Booroola said.  “It has been hard with out our master…. You remember his song?”
“Yes,” Rambouillet said thoughtfully. “Do you think he was true to us? Will the creator truly care for us?”
“Not just that,” Booroola said deeply.  “He now will be the shepherd through us.  We take care of one another as the shepherd did.”
A fire returned to Rambouillet’s eyes that had gone out long ago.  Now he felt something greater than his hay or flock.
Booroola smiled at it.  Rambouillet ran back to the fold and began to sing the song of the shepherd.
One by one the sheep looked up at him and stopped their grazing. They were open, ready for the message, ready for the fire.
“There are sheep across the river who need our help.  Little children, let us not love with words or tongue, but with actions and in truth! Booroola says they are to welcomed into the fold.”
The eyes looking at him began to blaze.  They followed him.  They followed the spirit of the shepherd in him.  Together they sang his anthem.
At the water’s edge, they threw down the haystacks on sticks and logs making a raft.  They threw it all in the swift waters of the river, giving up all that they had, trusting completely in the creator.  Grasping each other, they floated the raft across the river, a line of sheep from shore to shore. The two small long hair creatures jumped on the raft and were pulled to the safety of the shore. When they jumped off, the nest floated out, away, down the river leaving the flock with out their stores of treasure and two new members.
The next years were not easy, but they continued in the way of the shepherd.  They took care of one another completely.  Booroola followed the shepherd in laying down his life for the flock. It was now a flock of action.  Rambouillet, in his old age gave leadership of the flock to one of the little longhair sheep rescued that day.  Everyone, man and beast, who met one of the fold were amazed that domestic sheep had once again learned to follow the creator, and take care of themselves by his spirit.  They were more amazed at the love they showed to one another and strangers through their actions.
At the end of their journey there is a sheep pen where all shepherds sheep make one fold.  The Good Shepherd is there, and his spirit guides them.

Faces

2006-05-01T11:59:00.000-04:00

She opened the door to the coffee house and entered with a chill. Her face was glazed with ice, red with exercise. Her latte was large and warm to her touch. She sat in the cool light of the front window sipping through chapped lips. She didn’t take off her coat or earmuffs.
The sunglasses gave her a hard look, fashionable and self-assured, cool and aloof. Behind the sunglasses were soft eyes and a smooth cheek that betrayed her kindness and vulnerability.

Spring day

2006-04-10T14:00:00.000-04:00

“Look, Ella, you can see the moon.”
It was a cold clear day. Spring had just conquered the snow and frost. The only bastions left were in the northerly shadows. The ground in the park was wet and soggy, but that didn’t stop the small family from making a day of the park. Hot dogs were warming on the grill. A pair of discarded mittens lay at the sandbox.
Mom pushed Ella higher and higher – as high as the moon. “I see it,” Ella cried as the small white moon rose and fell between her feet.

Ella's story

2006-01-31T20:13:00.000-05:00

One a day the Happy Happy Princess fell into the coffee. And Mommy didn't see her. She drank it all up.

A former Resident turned romantic

2005-09-07T16:53:00.000-04:00

Northfield was a small town in Minnesota. It had beautiful old buildings downtown. A river ran through the middle of town cascading over a dam left by an old flour mill. The air down there smelled cool and refreshing. On one side of the river a walk way strolled behind the beautiful old buildings. A stone wall separated the walk from the river. The roar of the dam could be heard growing quieter behind as the walk continued down stream. Across the river a building met the wall rising over the river. Flower boxes in full bloom colored the rising wall.

There were two colleges in Northfield. So many young people and so much learning made it an extraordinary place. The shops downtown were not like most small towns. Open doors in the old store fronts would lead into rooms filled with the smell of well read books. The books were comfortable there. Rising shelves would create nooks where books would find any place available to curl up and wait. It was airy and rich in those places. It was so different from the libraries where the light and walls and everything made the books scream to be borrowed. No here the books were comfortable and at rest, and if you went in it would be hours before you came out. Whether you found treasure there or not you would leave with a smile, a sigh, and a far away look in your eyes.

Or through a screen door old records were like riches in boxes for collectors to find. Flat black disks lost to the memory of most of the young people who walk the streets of Northfield. They were labeled by the speed at which they spun, 78, 45 or 33 times around in a minute. Jazz, rock, blues, classical or even funk, the greatest musicians ever were found in boxes under the tables. On the tables were 8-tracks. They were like tapes but bigger, older, and stranger. If you didn’t have an 8-track player, good luck finding one. There were also some cassette tapes, but not as many because they were not as forgotten. A whole wall was packed with the best comic books to round out the experience.

Also down Division were coffee shops. Most small farming communities didn’t have any real coffee shops. Northfield had three and that was just on Division Street. Through screen doors squinting eyes could see dim warm lights around old beaten sofas and tables. The smell of coffee filled the air along with the din of conversation heavy with thought and depth. Walking into a place like that—ordering something lovely like a latte, a cappuccino, or an Americano—being surrounded by its warmth, felt like sitting on dad’s lap and feeling his warm breath heavy with the smell of coffee tickling the back of your neck.

There were art stores to tickle the creative wrinkles in the brain. There were stores full of interesting knickknacks and décor. There were ice cream shops and restaurants. There was a museum of local history and a union of youth. Northfield was an extraordinary place.

See more progress on: Northfield

Sleep Reclamation

2005-04-03T17:45:00.000-04:00

MacSood Bellemont sulked into the Office of Sleep Reclamation on the twelfth floor of the government building. It was spring and around the angered figure shone his mirror opposites. A cool breeze and a bird song floated through the window. The air was crisp, refreshing and hopeful. Below on the street, flowers were beginning to poke from the darkness, and green was returning to the trees and grass.

"Castigate daylight savings!" he snarled at the receptionist. "I want my hour back."

She motioned to him to have a seat. He sat, agitated, not wanting to think about what his lack of sleep had cost him. He felt grumpy, out of control. He preferred the peace of the night to the cold reality of day. His knees bounced, and his chin rested on his chest, his hands pressed flat together tightly.

"Mr. Bellemont, the doctor can see you now." The nurse led him down fiercely lit hallways. His eyes were slits refusing to adjust to the brightness. They turned into a dimly lit exam room with a two-way mirror on one wall and a bed in the middle. He lied down as she silently attached monitors and electrodes to his chest and forehead. He felt the anger and gloom drain from his body, his breathing slowed and soon he was asleep.

"Wake-Up!" his two-year-old daughter yelled in his ear.

"No," he replied sleepily, "Let me alone."

"Baby awake, Mommy awake, Ella awake," she went on. "Daddy, wake up," both of her hands grasped his shoulder and pulled him back and forth. "Daddy, wake up!" she yelled again.

Slowly MacSood forced his eyes open, and he turned to look at his daughter.

"Your hour is up, Mr. Bellemont," the nurse explained.

As he left, he pulled his collars up against the cold empty world.

Anaximander's Goggles (last part)

2004-12-10T17:26:00.000-05:00

A cold rain fell. Wallace adjusted his panama as he stepped from his craft on to the bank of the Missouri facing the crash site. Forrester walked around the car standing in contact with him, coveting his warmth. She pulled the collar of her jacket up around her cheeks.

Wallace put the stainless case on the hood and pressed the release buttons. The case opened with a gasp as the electric hum stopped. Carefully he lifted the goggles from their housing. He handed his hat to Forrester and situated the goggles on his face.

"The recorder is on," Forrester announced. "Special agents, Eric Wallace and Ella Forrester. Case number 7272144. Re: goggle test at Whiney crash site. Agent Wallace, testing, Agent Forrester reporting." As Ella dictated the information to the recorder, Eric turned the goggles on. All that he saw he dutifully reported to Ella and the record.

When he powered the goggles the gray landscape, yellowed by the tint of the lenses, burst into color. Greens were vivid, bluff walls glowed with reds and browns, raindrops became crystalline wonders. Eric's breathing slowed and shifted draw from his nose to his lips.

"I am now adjusting the goggles to the setting we found them at on Dr. Whiney."

The rain drops dissolved into a crystalline glow that served to shed light on the rest of the scene, enhancing the colors to ever increasing reality and life. Next the green of the grass dissolved away, revealing in living detail the soil, stone and bedrock beneath. Each layer gave way enhancing the beauty of the next. The layers continued to melt away, until earth gave way to sky, sky to space and space dissolved into a brightness that at first was blinding.

Eric blinked his eyes trying to adjust to the light. What could Dr. Whiney have possibly been trying to see? No bunkers, no tunnels, no secret labs, instead he was gazing beyond galaxy and universe.

"It is beautiful," Wallace announced, his eyes no longer served him, but he felt. He felt with new senses that filled in the void in his mind. Slowly he turned looking around. "It is all around me a sea, an in infinite ocean."

"The boundless… I think you are seeing through to the boundless."
Eric could feel his heart rate slowing and his natural senses were lost to him as he began feeling and seeing with new senses. He became aware of his own body and soul. He felt the sea, the ocean around him, teaming with life. Never was anything more real to him.

From wave after wave that broke over his body he felt the life enter him. His body felt strong his soul became just as real.

Ella watched him as his breath became shallow and his descriptions became labored, she watched him search for words language to express what he saw. She raised her hand to his flushed face now wet with tears, trying to quiet him. He relaxed and his disjointed rants became a song without words.

Her chin began to quiver. Something about his song pierced her soul she thought of her father, but for the first time in years the image was not his screaming face in the midst of an explosion, but of a lullaby. He seemed present. The life Wallace was describing to her was invading her through his song. It was familiar; her father was in that life, in that song.

Wallace was being overwhelmed by the beauty and power of life found in the boundless. His body began to quake. He felt as though he was falling, then he saw Ella's beautiful face. He didn't realize that she had pulled goggles from his face. His senses were all still heightened and her beauty struck him, as it never had before. He smiled, completely at peace.

Ella looked at his eyes; they seemed to be gazing through her. She felt for a pulse, there was none. She lifted his head and pressed her lips to his, feeling a residue of the song of life he sang.

"Case file closed, no question what happened now," she announced to the recorder through deep breaths. Her shaking hand reached her communicator. "Agent down…"

As she looked at his face, felt the life of the boundless on her lips, all the anger, bitterness and disappointment drained from her body. She felt her father and forgot her end-game. With one hand she held Eric's head, with the other she caressed his chest, and then removed her glasses. Slowly and with breathless anticipation, she pulled the goggles over her head.

Anaximander's Goggles Part the penultimate

2004-12-03T01:16:00.000-05:00

Take me to part 1

The night had emptied out the Midwest branch office of the DSC. Hallways were dark save the security lamps illuminating deco pillars up and down the hall. Through glass doors framed in brushed brass, a partly lit library with mahogany bookcases was home to the coffee and fatigue of agents Wallace and Forrester.

Eric Wallace growled as he looked up from a file rubbing his eyes. "Where are we?"

"Somewhere around square one," Ella replied without looking up from her stack.

Eric looked across the table at his colleague, tracing the curve of her jaw and neck with his eyes. Sitting back he asked "still nothing on this Anaximander?"

"No, Eric," she said suddenly looking up. "I've been thinking… maybe he was referring to the historical Anaximander."

Her enthusiasm and the light dancing in her eyes gave her such a powerful sincerity that Eric had to catch his breath. "How so?"

"Anaximander paints this image of the reality we know, the world, matter, everything, floating as a crust on an infinite sea he calls the boundless. He called the true work of philosophy getting under the surface."

"So maybe Anaximander was Dr. Whitney's inspiration?"

"Maybe… here is something you can relate to," Ella said with a coy smile. "The reason Anaximander looked for a boundless to be the source of everything is that if everything were made of just one of the elements, say water, it would mean that the world was founded on injustice. There had to be something greater, more primary behind it all."

"You thinking there is something more primary behind me?" Eric chuckled. "Now you really are getting out of your field of study. You know I read your file…"

"Is that supposed to surprise me?"

"Why did you do it Ella? Why join DSC anyway. You have a doctorate in Philosophy and another in Mathematics, and here you are playing damn good detective."

"If you read my file you know the answer." Ella's voice held a tension that cooled their playful mood.

"I know you lost your dad in the Omaha terrorist attack, but this is no place to get closure. You're smart enough to know that."

She flashed him a twisted smile, the light in her eyes retreating behind a cloud of some untold end-game. "I have my reasons," she said with a sigh throwing her head back. She stretched an took her hair down then said, "Lets get back to work."

She stood over Wallace's shoulder as they pursued again the moleskine of sketches.

***

Beep-Beep, Beep-Beep. The sound accompanying the red flashing light on the notepad on the table awoke agent Forrester. She had fallen asleep her head rested on her arm sprawled across the table. Wallace was on the rich leather of the couch, shoes kicked off, tie undone, collar open and white panama over his face.

Ella turned and whispered, "Eric, we have something."

***

Wallace, arrayed in a fresh suit, burst into the holding cell of the sleeping Gnomon lab tech throwing over a chair. Forrester also followed, fresh faced.

"You've been less than candid Clark!" Wallace punched the words into the air.

"Gnomon labs sent over your computer contents," Forrester chimed in.

"Seems once they learned what you have been up to, they were more than happy to cooperate."

"Especially when they found that your work was simply the ravings of a mad man," the beautiful Forrester laughed in his face. "You, crept your way into real scientists confidences so that you would have something to talk about. Does it make you feel important? Knowing all those secrets?"

"No you just like wearing the lab coat, isn't that right Clark?"

"No, No, I was Dr. Whitney's right hand man, I was his inspiration. He couldn't have done it with out me."

"I don't see it," Wallace said. "The good doctor did all he could do to get you transferred or fired, didn't he?"

"No! He needed me. He would never…"

"We found memos on your computer that you intercepted to save your own butt," Forrester lashed.

"I did that for him. He couldn't go on with out me. I am Anaximander. I am his Anaximander!"

"You'd like to think that wouldn't you. Your pathetic," Wallace turned a disgusted face.

"That's what Whitney told you isn't it?" Forrester said coolly.

"Is that why you killed him?"

"No! No." Clark, shaken sat sobbing quieting as the moments went by. "I needed him. I needed the goggles, when he crashed I knew my life was over."

"Who were you scared of? Bustamonte?"

"No, these men are dangerous, terrorists the lot of them. I knew they would kill me soon and that my life was worthless, that is why I came clean about Bustamonte."

"Not clean enough."

Anaximander's Goggles Part the antepenultimate

2004-11-12T14:43:00.000-05:00

"Take me to Dr. Whitney's things," Clark, still arrogant, demanded.

"Not a chance," Wallace replied pulling from his breast pocket the moleskine Dr. Whitney used, a foil gum wrapper marking a page. "What do you make of this?"

Thumbing through the book Clark looked puzzled and a little angry. "Gibberish!" he exclaimed. "This is the only thing I can read."

He pointed to a Greek word. "anaximander." Wallace looked at Forrester who adjusted her glasses and after a moment replied, "Anaximander."

Clark took the foil up in his hands, turning it around, staring at it while the two agents talked.

"He was a presocratic philosopher."

"I'm no philosopher Dr. Forrester. Why don't you put that doctoral philosopher's brain to work for me?"

"Well, he was a mathematician, he developed the sundial. He was also known for looking for the unified field theory of the sixth century BCE, the origin of the elements, kind of an early evolutionist."

"What could that possibly have to do with this twenty-first century murder? Could Anaximander be an alias for someone?"

Suddenly Wallace jumped at Clark. "What did you do with that gum wrapper?"

"Nothing," Clark replied, thrusting his hands in his pocket. Slowly he withdrew them, "I must have absentmindedly put it in my pocket. Tell me is it yours or was it Dr. Whitney's?"

"It was his, there must have been a dozen of them in his car," Forrester answered.

Clark's eyes widened and then he made a conscious effort to put on what he thought was a poker face. "Ah, so that is where you got the goggles? Dr. Whiney had them?"

"Care to share what you know?" Wallace asked.

"I suppose you'll find out soon enough on your own. The goggles are designed to see through the loosely bound particles that make up matter. Only Dr. Whitney knows how they work, some how they create a field that bends time and isolates the particles, something to do with the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Like I said, I don't know the science behind it, no one in this world does now."

"Didn't he leave any notes behind?" Forrester probed.

"Just this … Gibberish!" Clark growled.

"What does this have to do with that gum wrapper?"

"This, agent Wallace is the first thing we could see through with the goggles. It dissolved into a dull glow and our protective gloves became visible. Whitney always dreamed of taking the device out side and looking through organic material, but removing it was impossible."

"Apparently not," Wallace replied. He and Forrester left an agitated and quiet Clark in the interrogation room.

Anaximander's Goggles Part 3

2004-11-02T19:52:00.000-05:00

“I told you not to come here.”

“I don’t take orders, Clark. I told you that when you offered our… partnership,” Bustamonte retorted. “Someone hacked the system, email isn’t safe.”

“Relax, we’re on track. Just stay calm. We have to be in for the long haul for this to work.”

“I don’t know if you have the cahones, Clark. You worry me. You sure your experiment isn’t going to be discovered.”

Clark stung from the condescension. “None of us wants that Bustamonte. Time isn’t something to play with, if the company found out that I was making something on the side by revealing secrets to a slime such as yourself, they would hurt you more than me.”

Bustamonte’s red face was stopped short when he saw two figures approaching. The silhouette of a man wearing a hat, light glinting from polished toes, and the curves of a woman’s dress, her hair creating a halo around her head held pistols toward the two men.

***

“What are you getting from Gnomon labs Bustamonte?” Wallace questioned the man in a white room of blazing lights; his double-breasted blue suit and white carnation contrasting the captive’s disheveled clothes and nervous pallor. “we know you have been trafficking in classified information. That is a felony. A good prosecutor could make a case for treason. You had better start singing.”

Bustamonte rested a sweaty brow in his hands and slumped, silent.

In another room Ella Forester’s eyes shone behind lenses illuminated by the bright lights.

“You weren’t forthcoming with us Mr. Clark. It seems Bustamonte knows more classified information about Gnomon than we do. You will both rot for a long time, or worse.

Clark let a nervous titter escape.

“Treason is nothing to laugh off, Clark.”

“It’s not that agent Forrester. I’m willing to roll on that pig, Bustamonte. That is the word isn’t it? No matter. Bustamonte intimidated me into giving him any advantage. We arranged for thousands of commuters to pass through a Gnomon test area that is hidden.”

“Hidden?” Forrester repeated with a raised eyebrow.

“Yes, it works by… let us just say, it bends time.”

“What would Bustamonte get out of it?”

“Each pass through the area would alter a mag-craft’s chronometer. Over the course of a few years he would stand to make extra millions on early returns and maintenance. The impression on the stock holders was worth his compensating me handsomely.”

“Sound’s pretty damning for Bustamonte,” Forrester observed. “I have a feeling you are not so innocent, and the prosecutor puts a lot of weight into our report, I can make it go easy on you, or hard. Perhaps you can make a better impression yet.”

“How?”

“Tell me how you and Bustamonte murdered Doctor Whitney.”

“I don’t know… I mean we didn’t… I didn’t.”

“That is not a better impression.” Ella rose putting her papers in her folder.

“Wait… Wait, I’ll help you with your investigation—I can tell you what he was working on!”

Ella smiled and walked out of the room.

Part 4

Anaximander's Goggles Part 2

2004-10-25T16:30:00.001-04:00

The day had turned cold; a fresh air blew across a field, the amber grain rustling to an unseen presence. Jose Gerrera stood at a gravel crossroads leaning against his 1945 Cord waiting, taking in the breeze.

From the west he saw a glint and a silhouette. He straightened and peered trying to identify the approaching craft, the evening sun in his eyes. The doors opened and Wallace and Forrester found him in his uneasy stance. He relaxed back into his car.

“What have you got Jose?” Wallace asked.

“Time…” Jose said with a smirk. “I ran the chronometric readings from the Mag-Craft fleet and found that there were hundreds of mags with chronometers off by seconds, even minutes.”

“I wonder why.” Wallace hummed.

“I thought you’d be wondering. So I did a little checking.” Wallace gave a smile and a wink. Jose
continued, “I Googled the Mag-Craft computers and decrypted some interesting communiqués between Bustamonte and a certain lab tech at Gnomon labs-name of Clark. It seems the result was a tweak, to the Mag-Craft GPS system, which reroutes thousands of commuters through a 100 acre space on the Missouri river.”

Wallace and his partner shared a look.

“Eric?” Jose questioned his friend’s glance. After a pause he continued, “Well, I don’t know what to make of it, but it looks like the intel is in good hands.”

“Yes,” Wallace responded, “and we’d better get back to Gnomon labs. Thank you my friend.”

***

“Wallace and Forrester took up position in front of the Gnomon labs building. The postmodern architecture illuminated in the darkness of the cool night. The agents sat in the darkness of their voluptuous mag-craft, sipping coffee and occasionally checking on their surveillance equipment.

“Eric, do you ever wonder if there is more to life than this.”

“Than what El?”

“I don’t know, stakeouts and conspiracy?”

“Ella! Don’t you have enough mystery in your life?” Wallace scolded. “Take this place: classified G12. Here we are digging in where we don’t belong, uncovering the hidden mysteries of our time, and you want more?”

“Absolutely, facing this stuff all the time forces me to think beyond the mundane routine the rest of the world faces.”

“You’ll grow out of it the longer you stay in this business,” Wallace said with a quizzical smile. “I’m going to have to stop taking you to the country, you always come back romantic.”

“Doesn’t it do anything to you? Don’t the flowers and grain and sky make you feel apart of something bigger?”

Eric looked into her eyes finding there a life and depth he found attractive. His mind went back to days as a boy when he felt that kind of unlimited presence. Suddenly he was aware that his eyes were betraying his thoughts and he laughed it off. Returning to the surveillance there was, for a moment, silence.

“Justice,” Wallace said with enigmatic significance.

Ella waited for him to continue. “Justice?…”

“I guess that is where I feel most connected with something bigger than myself. That is why I started this job, but it has less to do with correcting injustice than I had imagined in my more sentimental days.”

Ella returned her gaze out the windshield and smiled. After a moment of quiet reflection her expression changed, “Oh-oh, look who we have here.”

She nodded toward a large figure waddling to the corner of the street. The man took off his fedora and waved it stealthily as he wiped his sweat drenched face. Out of the bushes came a man with slick hair parted in the middle, thick round glasses and a full-length double-breasted white lab coat that gave him the look of a mad scientist from a B-movie.

Part 3

The First Place I Knew

2004-09-29T15:46:00.000-04:00

The lilacs bloomed in a row behind our house, separating us from the schoolyard beyond. My memories of this place are sketchy. From old photographs I can tell you that, to my surprise, the house was red-orange. I remember making the houses on my street out of scraps of lumber cut in wavy patterns giving them each an abstract future. Looking at the old picture of the house throws my mind back—a glimpse of mixing the red and the orange to match our house. The flash is my only proof that at least once in my life the color was not surprising to me.

I moved around a lot when I was young. I am the son of a preacher. This first was his longest stay at a church. I was seven when we left the only home I knew. The rest of my childhood runs together like wet watercolors, I can’t distinguish memories, but instead see them all through the transparent layers of the rest.

My earliest memory. I see a dresser, with the second drawer pulled open. My dad pulling out baby clothes. I am three, this I know only because that was my age when my brother was born and the clothes were for him. Dad packed them to go to the hospital. A day or two later I remember thanksgiving, my Mom and baby brother were still in the hospital, and Dad and I had thanksgiving dinner. We went over to the house of a couple who came to our church. This too is but a shred of memory reconstructed from a picture of lefse that exists only in the album of my mind. Even now my mouth waters for the Norwegian treat.

Now I see myself in a small apartment. There was an exercise bike and I walk around with an old ear plug from the days of the crystal radios. The couple that babysat me in this small unique place were unique themselves. Pete was a hundred years old, which was no fanciful imagination on my part. I may have been the only five year old to know what it looked like to really be a hundred. His wife was only seventy.

I remember singing, alone, in the garden. I walked around singing whatever came to my head, songs of my tender love for the God so central in my family, until the song was lost completely forgotten, the words gone from my tongue and received into heaven no longer my own. After repeating the last phrase I sung a few times, with furrowed brow, I shrugged and played at something else. This memory is fast in my mind, but I cannot say if it is the place I knew first or next.

On the day we left the red orange house, I recall the image of the neighbor girl racing me to the lilacs. That is how we said goodbye. A race and no words, but it was the way of a seven year old boy to bring closure on the only place he had known.

Vintage shoes

2004-09-20T16:16:00.000-04:00

High stepping with a tapity-tap-tap, seventy-year-old shoes came dancing into my way. Spats, rivets, 1930, my world is new. Zipped up and snapity-snap-snapped, they clothe my feet with a smooth motivation. The divine impetus of history courses from toe to top. Brown leather, glen check spat and brass, all their silky reverie on display.

Anaximander's Goggles Part 1

2004-08-29T15:13:00.000-04:00

“The crash itself is suspicious, sir.” Police Chief Dunbar told the DSC officer. “The craft’s safety protocols were bypassed and it appears to have been piloted directly into the bluff face.”

Eric Wallace, part of the Domestic Security Corps, was called in to investigate because of the sensitive nature of Whitney’s work. The tall DSC man strode towards the edge of the bluff. He wore a white panama, a blue chalk stripe double-breasted with wide lapels that only gave a hint of a tie beneath its knot, and a white carnation. He removed his hat as he looked over and wiped sweat from his brow.

“Is the scene preserved?”

Chief Dunbar gave a nod.

Walking over to the investigators, he strapped into one of their climbing harnesses and with a quick “on-belay” he was over the edge.

The crash was some twenty feet from the top of the bluff; the rushing Missouri was another thirty feet below that. The government man found himself face to face with the mysterious Dr. Ambrose Whitney. The restraint system had deployed, and the suspended body should have received no harm.

His face was frozen in a look of wonder. There was a red glow to his cheeks, and his agape mouth turned up at the corners. The restraint system had stopped a single tear rolling down his cheek. Over his eyes were goggles—round dark-lenses sheathed in a brown leather shield.

Wallace was the first to deactivate the restraint system releasing all the evidence to laws of thermodynamics. Before deactivation, the computer in his carnation recorded the crash data and position of all the evidence in a three-dimensional rendering. Dr. Whitney’s body slumped forward when it was released from stasis.

Wallace quickly felt for a pulse. The Doctor’s heart, when stasis was deactivated, raced for a few seconds before stopping suddenly. He was dead.

****

Wallace put his panama on the hat tree in the corner of the office and sauntered to the banker’s box filled with contents of Whitney’s car. They went over mag-craft with a fine-toothed comb, no sign of mechanical failure. In fact the craft’s computer pointed to deliberate action on the part of Dr. Whitney. All the same they sent the craft to the manufacture for diagnostic.

Wallace riffled through the box, he found an empty coffee cup, smelling it he determined it was a cappuccino, dry, double. There was a gum wrapper.

“Probably chewed it after the coffee,” his young partner Ella Forester offered walking in the room.

“Not a chance,” Wallace responded waving the cup, “a man who orders his cappuccino dry would never follow it up with sweets.”

He picked up a black hardbound pocket-sized book; undoing the elastic clasp he flipped through pages of sketches and formulas.

“A Moleskine,” he explained. “Hemmingway carried one for his notes.”

“What are all those drawings?”

“Scribbling… there seems to be no logic to it,” He replied.

Then he turned to the back cover. There was a pocket there, and hidden with in was a sketch of the archaic goggles that the doctor was wearing when he was found.

“Why was he wearing these things anyway?” Wallace asked holding the goggles comparing them to the picture in the book.

“His mag was a convertible, maybe he thought it was fashionable to wear goggles,” Forester replied. Looking closer at the sketch and its various labels, her face creased and turned to the side slightly. “What the hell is that thing?”

“The goggles? Lets find out.”

****

A government mag-craft set down in front of a building with title Gnomon Research Laboratories. A man in a suit and a panama hat, and a woman in a dark blue s-line dress and dark hair up in an array of gossamer spikes walked through the glassy doors.

On the 26th floor of the laboratories the debonair blue-suited DSC man picked up a blinking object and turned it over looking at it. “What did you say Dr. Whitney was working on?” Wallace asked the white-coated lab tech.

“I didn’t, Mr. Wallace was it?” the tech said as he took the object from the agent’s hand. “His work is confidential.”

“What is it that Gnomon does in general?” Forester asked.

“We are in time. Atomic clocks and the like,” the tech answered.

Wallace looked around at the various digital clock faces on the walls and nodded with a raised eyebrow.

“And what do you make of this?” Wallace asked pulling the goggles from his breast pocket.

“The prototype, where did you get that?” the tech ejaculated reaching for the goggles.

“Hold on there buckwheat, this is evidence.” Wallace warned pulling back.

“At least keep it in this,” the tech sighed agitated, as he placed a metal suitcase on the table. It opened with a gasp. Inside was a molded pad that held the goggles perfectly in controlled humidity and temperature. When Wallace placed the goggles inside, the case sealed with a magnetic hum.

“What do the goggles do?” Wallace didn’t expect the tech to be forthcoming.

Silence.

“Why so surprised to see them?” Forrester followed up.

“The prototype was stolen from the lab vaults two weeks ago.”

“Why didn’t you notify the Corps of the theft?”

Silence.

“Do you know why anyone would want to hurt Dr. Whitney?” Wallace asked.

The tech shook his head. “Now if you’ll excuse me.”

****

“I don’t like that guy,” Forrester said. “ He is hiding something.”

“He’s hiding more than that,” Wallace said looking at his pad. “Gnomon is classified G12. We may have more than we can chew here. Lets check on the mag-craft diagnostic.”

Mag-Craft Corp. is the world leader in magnetic repulsion vehicles. It is to mags what Kleenex is to tissue. They were headquartered in a sleek building near Chicago. The two Corps agents wasted no time in arriving. They made their way to the all to familiar test facility.

“Jose, my friend, what do you make of the mystery mag?”

“I don’t know Eric. It looks flawless, or at least as flawless as you’d expect after becoming part of the Iowa landscape…. One odd thing though: the craft’s chronometer is off a few hundredths of a second.”

“Doesn’t sound like much,” Wallace replied.

“It’s a whole hell of a lot when you consider it is atomic.”

“Let me guess, Gnomon Labs?”

“Yeah… Oh-oh here comes the boss.”

“Wallace!” A sizeable man yelled as he waddled across the floor. His hair was slick and his cloths were as loud as his gruff voice.

“Bustamonte, what a pleasant surprise.”

“Pleasant my sweet behind. You know damn well that we have not had any fatalities since we introduced the Emergency Stasis Restraint system twenty years ago, what is the meaning of sending us this crapper?”

“You know how it is Bustamonte, just have to rule out the global corporate giant as a murder suspect.”

“Murder? See, I knew it wasn’t our system that killed the man.”

“We’ll see,” Forrester said under her breath.

“Let me know if you find anything else Jose,” Wallace said quietly as Bustamonte was walking away.

“You bet, Eric.”

****

Part 2

2004-06-23T18:22:00.000-04:00

In the middle of the city, nestled among storefront buildings from another time, a garden waits: a box canyon of building walls, with a park bench waiting in ambush. That is precisely what happened to Jacob Illyovich. Ambushed. The smell of hollyhock drew him and he could not defy the park bench in the warm fragrance laden air. His feet heavy from treading the streets of the city, plodded toward the bench. His face dry and eyes arid from the dusty oppressive summer day drank the humidity of that place.
As if a dream, a quiet reverie, his body, like a feather fell. His head resting on his arm, his body sprawling across the splintery green bench, his eyes closed and his mind finally quieted.

Stupid pants stew

2003-04-28T14:37:00.000-04:00

Well. Here we are in a stew. It is a big pot of stew at that. Oh look is that a piece of meat floating by? A carrot? I don’t know. Maybe the water is hot. I thought I was taking a bath, but maybe the water is hotter now. Yeah, there, it is bubbling. It feels relaxing, but I have a bad feeling about this. If we stay in here much longer our goose is cooked so to speak, or at least that is what my dumpling is telling me.
Oh, hi dumpling. It is sure now. Chicken and dumpling stew. With me surprise. What ever will I do? Well, I guess my pants have too much starch, maybe I can float with them. Maybe I can finally get out of my stupid pants and then stand on them to jump out. Then I’ll help you out.

Stupid pants

2003-04-27T14:39:00.000-04:00

Stupid, stupid pants. That is what I have… Stupid pants . In the midst of a dark night, they came to me. The walked on their own, full of too much starch. They came to my window and knocked it. I opened it and let it in. I don’t know why, and I now wish that I hadn’t because they have made my life a torment.
One day when walking down the street wearing my stupid pants, I kicked a can and it kicked back. I guess the can didn’t like the pants. I had never seen the like, but I would see many more strange things while wearing stupid pants.
I walked by a girl one day. My pants still had too much starch. They were round and full, pipes on my legs. They were solid and my legs were like clappers in large bells. They rang. Rang like bells on my wedding day. But I was only a kid, and the girl I walked by was not impressed.
Stupid pants. If I try to sit down my pants won’t let me. They stand straight out like an old skirt, the kind that has hoops in it. Pretty soon, the legs get so heavy that I just stand back up.
I don’t know why I still wear them, but once I got them on, I can’t get out of them again. I’m not tall enough, and I can’t jump that high. It would be better if they could bend. But they can’t, so I am stuck in stupid pants until I grow tall enough to step out of them.

Dark lines of mouse, cheese and sun

2003-04-09T16:28:00.000-04:00

The mouse crept ever quietly toward the Roquefort cheese, its pungent smell drawing and luring him, intoxicating him. Drunk the mouse stepped forward with out judgment’s delays. His mouth watered like a mad animal creating flecks of froth at the corner of his mouth where the heavy breath was escaping. Before he could reach the large piece the fumes, those glorious fumes, had overtaken him entirely. Overcome the mouse passed out, and with final movement strained to get nose to cheese. There with out consciousness he drank in the mind destroying seduction.

The sun and death found him there.